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The Chelsea Detective: Series 3
R0 - United Kingdom - Acorn Media Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (29th June 2025). |
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The Film
 When the discover of an early-2000s pop star's (Martha Kirby) body in her bathtub pumped full of drugs proves suspicious, it puts the lie to the notion that Everybody Loves Chloe, sending Max and company delving into her relationships with her mother (London Has Fallen's Penny Downie), former producer (Trigger Point's Nabil Elouahabi), supposedly ex-junkie roommate (Poppy Gilbert), her too-solicitous downstairs neighbor (The Hunting Party's Nitin Ganatra), and even a respected MP (The Madness of King George's Julian Wadham); but, are the police really getting anywhere or are they they just providing material for the victim's tell-all biography being penned by a disgruntled ex-journalist (Hidden's Sian Reese-Williams). Cybercrime colleague Sean Kildare (Highlander: The Source's Stephen Wight) reveals that one of the victim's many social media trolls had taken things farther than usual in the months preceding her death but even he may be withholding information for a piece of the action. This is one of those cases where everyone having their own secrets they want to protect from the public wastes a lot of police time and the culprit is harder to guess simply because of the multitude of suspects fighting for screen time. Max and company find themselves in a Deadlock when the discover of a skeleton in a garden allotment turns out not to be the missing owner nor the person whose wallet is among the remains but third party with ties to the office of American ambassador Emily Morgan (ER's Alex Kingston) and the red tape of diplomatic immunity shared by herself and her close staff. As Max and Layla try to untangle the web of relationships and subterfuge, Max suspects that someone with intelligence training is sabotaging their investigation from the inside. The plotting of this episode feels a bit convoluted and drug out but the culprit definitely earns the viewer's ire in their absolute contempt for anyone the feel they can put below them due to their security status, especially when the nature of the original crime is revealed (reminding some viewers of another recent case involving the death of an innocent victim caught up in the perpetrator's claims of immunity). Kingston has a terrible American accent but otherwise gives a fantastic performance that humanizes her seemingly icy character. Mudlarkers Stacey (Emma McDonald) and deaf Jake (Jude Powell) stumble upon something more realistic than Myths and Legends sifting through the Chelsea surf at low tide when they unearth a solid gold coin. They take it to antiques dealer Niall Hammond (William Scott-Masson) but Jake suspects they have been ripped off when Stacey accepts £500 for what Hammond calls "scrap metal." When Hammond is found bludgeoned to death in his shop, his internet search history and a photo of the coin on his phone identifying it as one of the surviving of a line struck for Edward VIII before he abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson seems to provide a million pound motive for murder; that is, until they expose the dirty laundry of his family including his unhappy estranged wife Nicole (My Week with Marilyn's Miranda Raison), his daughter Leah (Rose Galbraith) who felt pressured into playing the violin by her father whose chances were ruined by a car accident, his alcoholic son Dominic (Freddie Dennis) recently released from jail after an assault on his father, as well as the father (Jack Pierce) of one of Leah's rivals for a position in the quartet of Danish conductor Thomas Johanssen (The Girl Who Played with Fire's Magnus Krepper) who believes that the victim bought his daughter's position which was all but promised to his son. One of the two more interesting cases in series three, we get a victim who is pretty much awful all-around, a villain who believes their fraudulent ends justify the means including the murder, and the only person Max and Layla see committing a crime appears to be another of Chelsea's entitled class but actually provides part of the solution to the case.  When the body of a cycling climate scientist (Night & Day's Dominic Rickhards) is found in the trunk of a stolen car, Max and Layla must determine if he was the victim of a hit-and-run, ideology, or something much more venal in For the Greater Good. The car's owner Taymoor Bukhari (Coronation Street's Charlie de Melo) is suspicious enough in not reporting it missing but he does not seem to have any connection to the victim. Young joyriders Finn (Rowan McIntosh) and Stan (The Kid Who Would Be King's Louis Ashbourne Serkis), who stole the car and only left it after the charge ran out, claim ignorance about their being a body in the trunk but do not exactly have clean hands with regard to the victim's missing personal belongings which fortunately include a bike helmet cam charting his route the day of his death. His personal life unearths more suspects and motives including colleague (Doctors's Laura Rollins) who filed a plagiarism complaint against him and just as quickly retracted it, his wife (In Bruges' Anna Madeley) who would do anything to get him to notice her, his mother-in-law (The Elephant Man's Phoebe Nicholls) who seems to be trying to steer the investigation with strategic revelations of family private business, and the victim's father-in-law (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl's Kevin McNally) whose multi-billion dollar real estate project he scuttled with a damning environmental impact report. The dramatic subplot involving deaf coroner Ashley Wilton (Marchlands' Sophie Stone) and her troubled son is the most compelling element of this case. The culprit is pretty obvious in a scene so stunning in its obviousness, yet the case remains compelling simply because we still want to know the whydunnit. Unlike the transition from the first series to the second of The Chelsea Detective, very little has changed in Max's life between the second and third. He has grown accustomed to his series two replacement partner Layla who is struggling with the idea of possibly becoming a stepmom to the teenage daughter of her constantly away-on-business boyfriend. Whereas dyslexic Max and Layla depend on their intuition, Detective Constable Jess Lombard (Lucy Phelps) delves deep into data and sometimes goes down rabbit holes while Detective Constable Connor Pollock(Peter Bankole) sticks to the facts on duty and prepping for IVF with his wife after hours. Max's eccentric aunt Olivia (A Zed & Two Noughts' Frances Barber) drops in periodically to offer her unrequested services as a sounding board for Max's cases and offer relationship advice. Coroner Ashley has a bit more to do this series when one case involves a deaf suspect sleeping rough and another hits too close to home. Although it appeared that his estranged wife Astrid (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days' Anamaria Marinca) was unofficially saying goodbye when she went back to Leipzig to take care of her ailing mother, she is back this series and the two are moving in fits and starts towards a reconciliation and running into the same problems: his work gets in the way and she keeps trying to hurry things along with therapy. This subplot running through all four episodes is the least-interesting bit and actually grating. While we might have been on Max's side in the first series as he was getting over his father's death and trying to fix his private life, we kind of felt worry for Astrid in series two was things were obviously not working out, but in series three both of them are indecisive and obviously a detriment to each being able to move on. Once again, the seem to have said final goodbyes at the end of the fourth episode, so it remains to be seen if Max does truly want to get on with his life in series four. 
Video
Series three splits four feature-length episodes between two discs. The PAL anamorphic 1.78:1 widescreen transfers are softish, but this is presumably intentional to give the episodes a more "cinematic" feel with plenty of shallow focus extreme close-ups as well as some background/foreground focus shifts of compositions that could have just as easily had both planes in focus. The night sequences are softish and possibly some of the noise in a couple shadows is the result of quick-and-dirty location shooting at night without sufficient light to bring down brightness in post. 
Audio
The Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo soundtracks for each episode are dialogue-heavy with a few directional effects underlining action and very sparse atmospherics with music doing more of the work in setting mood. Optional English HoH subtitles have some proofing and transcription errors and one wonders whether the subtitles are done by AI for the home entertainment division of Acorn or if even the production arm uses auto-transcription. 
Extras
The sole extra is a picture gallery (1:02).
Overall
Series three of The Chelsea Detective is a bit uneven with its cases but the main problem is still finding a balance between the investigations and the private lives of the characters.
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