aYou know, former metropolitan detectives who have moved to a quiet town in the north for personal reasons, yearning for the big cases and exciting days of yesteryear. Be careful what you wish for! Detective Lia Ajungwa (Wunmi Mosaku) is our horny gal here in actor Andrew Buchan’s screenwriting debut (no, come back, come back, okay!), The Passenger is. She moved to Chadervale, a small town in rural Lancaster, five years ago with her husband, who wanted to be closer to her family.
Now that he’s gone, she’s taking care of her mentally unstable mother, but most of her belongings are missing trash cans, and sometimes even a cat. There’s some strange excitement among the protesters at the fracking site that Jim (David Threlfall) plans to own, but the rest of the site is a dumpster.
But luckily there’s some nasty smut at the local bakery. At the very least, it’s uncomfortable to be in and out of on a semi-regular basis. Something that causes a gasp of horror when drivers see it. These dark oozes, and various other spooky disturbances, are perplexing those who have never seen a supernatural story metaphor across a nationally representative town before.
Local girl Katie Wells (Rowan Robinson) is driving through the woods with her friend Mehmet (Shervin Alenaby) one night after a falling out with her boyfriend John (Jack James Ryan). Then something big, dead, and bloody fell down. bonnet. Mehmet stares open, unblinking. Because while “Passengers” leans into folklore and TV metaphors, it still manages to deliver something that feels fresh and real. The next thing we see is him safely home, sound asleep in his bed. Katie is missing.
Since she is still young and has her mother’s car, no one will notice her for 24 hours. (“Why does she come back?” seems to be the prevailing opinion in Chadervale.) Just when she realizes that her mother might be wrong, Katie returns. She obviously wasn’t too badly worn, but there was no explanation for that either.
Meanwhile, Riya and her team (two of the comedy sidekicks, especially one of them, Ariane Nick, who plays Nish, seem to belong to another show, but are so funny that I can forgive the audio disturbance) , found a split stag among the animals. In the woods near Katie’s abandoned car. A sticky black liquid will splatter. It’s probably engine oil – you know mechanics like to carve up deer in their spare time – but Riya sends it to the lab anyway. Of course she needs to talk to Katie. Katie starts coughing up a lot of stuff and his condition gets worse and worse. Mehmet is oblivious. Because he’s too busy playing a weird video game so intently that it’s almost like he’s…possessed.
Adding more tangible horror to the supernatural threat. A man sentenced to 10 years in prison for stabbing Jim will be released early. Eddie Wells (Barry Sloan) is Katie’s father. He was not welcome anywhere, but his wife took him in. He tried to enter her younger daughter’s bedroom while she was out. With a tact that must have come from her practice, she turned to him and locked the door.
Here, everything from a daughter’s unspoken fear to a factory owner’s fear of displeasing the masters who are using his location as part of an oozing cargo smuggling operation, Jim’s PTSD, and even something darker. Various kinds of anxiety and fear are depicted as natural. A timeless horror symbolized by the forest and its potentially malevolent inhabitants. Her two episodes (one of six) released for review strike a nice balance between the mundane and the mystical, each heightening the potential horror of the other. . Alone in the forest, Riya suffers from flashbacks of some kind of childhood trauma that has not yet emerged from the shadows.
There are strange moments that pull you out of the story. For example, Leah seems oddly unfazed when she finds bloodstains in Katie’s car and on the steering wheel, before noticing that Katie has reappeared. In the second episode, Katie finds a website dedicated to “The Curse of Chadervale.” It seems strange that she had never heard of it before and that the locals did not mention it when telling Riya for the past five years.
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Nevertheless, this is a confident, well-paced, atmospheric series that I hope continues to be just as sure-footed and frightening until the end.
