The Salisbury Poisonings

[JaneJeffer]

Why hasn't the police officer twigged he's been poisoned yet?

We didn’t understand why they had to use nerve agent if they wanted to assassinate them surely an easier way (pretend car crash sniper) than smearing toxins all over a market town?

Also we got annoyed with the main woman’s family fgs could the dad not step in and unless special needs the son was old enough to be more independent in the circumstances. Good program though

According to local news it was being refurbished but no idea if that's now finished.

I thought it was very well done, especially the sensitive way they portrayed Dawn, focussing on her as a person rather than her chaotic life.

I watched it all last night and thought it very well done. My only complaint was, as previous poster have said, that Tracy shouldn't have been bogged down by school runs and a stroppy teen while coordinating he council's response to an international incident. Why didn't her husband just step up? And the boy was old enough not to sulk about his mum working on what was probably, the biggest incident of her career.

It would have been better if she'd just booked a hotel room for a couple of weeks and left them to it.

Other than that, I liked it. Loved the portrayal of Dawn's family, raising her child and trying to accept her addictions.

Poor guinea pigs though 🙁

I was also annoyed by Tracy's family and confused by the perfume bottle.

If the bottle was the source, why and how was it found sealed by Charlie? I remember a reference to "fetching a scissors" in a conversation between Dawn and Charlie this confirming to the viewer that the bottle was sealed?

Unless the perpetrators sealed it back up again deliberately before binning it?

I completely lost the sense of timeline in that last episode. Maybe the bins were deliberately left unemptied or overlooked in the aftermath of the lockdown.?

At least they tracked the likely source of the Novickok though.

Gripping drama, but given the sheer bizarreness if the incident waaay too many unanswered questions for my liking. .

What happened to the Skripal's house, was it semi detached ?
If so, was the neighbours house affected ?
What happened to Nick Bailey's house ?
Has it been demolished ?
Was it detached ?
Did anyone on the Skripal's road notice the Russian agents putting the nerve agent on the door handle ?

Forgive me if all these questions have been answered on the programme, I have only seen Part 1.

Did the spy’s house get demolished?

I’d have thought that the public health woman’s husband would have totally guessed what she was doing even if She couldn’t say. If you know your wife is in charge of public health where suddenly there’s a major public health incident, and your wife suddenly starts working crazy hours and says she can’t tell you what she’s doing you’d see the news reports and put 2+2 together and do the school run and tell your ds to stop moaning. Guess it may have been artistic licence.

I'm glad other people thought that about Tracey's family. I wanted to tell the son to stop being stroppy!

Perhaps scarier than this incident though is the fact weapons like this have been used, most recently in Syria, against large amounts of civilians. I can't imagine the horror.

Presumably the Russian agents sprayed the novichok on the door which meant they never actually came into contact with it themselves. Easy enough for someone 'leafleting' or 'delivering' to do. The Russians and the Soviets before them have long used particularly horrible ways of killing people. I can't remember his name, I'm sorry, but there was the guy given radioactive tea and Georgi Markov who was jabbed by an umbrella in London and poisoned with ricin. My guess is that a long, drawn out and painful death is seen as retribution and possibly as a deterrent for anyone else considering betraying Russia.

That was the other thing that bothered me, that the bins didn't appear to have been emptied. Or maybe Charlie found it early on and there was a time-jump that went over my head?

I assumed the assassins carefully sprayed the door handle, probably wearing gloves, and had resealed the bottle as they wanted to transport it without accidentally killing themselves, then chucked it as they passed through town. And had the bin been emptied, it would have gone straight to landfill and no one would have been any the wiser.

The chap with the plutonium poisoning was poisoned 3x because they wanted him to die a slow painful death.

I thought the perfume bottle was the original carrier. The words are those of the actual people so maybe Charlie wanted it to look like he had bought it new.

Trying to remember back, I thought the chain of events was

A) the bins hadn’t been emptied due to the area being closed off

B) Charlie had got the bottle earlier and kept it for a few months.

I think they were charity bins not normal bins.

I thought the perfume looked like it was in one of those security cases that shops put them in? How did it get in there?!

We thought it was great, I liked the fact they showed the actually real people at the end

I suppose it's possible that the bottle was found by Charlie long before he gave it to Dawn. As it had been used when found, we only have Charlie's word that he found it sealed. The conversations between himself and Dawn which suggest (to me, anyway) that Charlie gave Dawn the bottle sealed may not have taken place.

At s guess, I think Charlie found the bottle unsealed and didn't admit it to save face.

The perps had used it then binned it, thinking that was the end of the matter.

Fascinating stuff.

Excellent portrayal of the events, sobering that this was a dramatization of real life recent events too!

Scary how they managed to get a bottle of novachok on a domestic airline and all the way to Salisbury.

So many unanswered quetions. Where were the intelligence organisations, how could 2 KGB agents travel into the UK without any alerts. Dont we have intelligence in Russia keeping an eye on nerve agent development?

It was really distrurbing to watch as it could easily happen again and seemingly be handled by local inexperienced services. They had an emotional, unprofessional public health person in charge doing the school run? Her son said she was a hero, why? It was all good luck rather than management that it wasn't a major disaster. The perfume bottle was found in the home of the victim, not down to anything heroic.

It's scary to think that nerve powder was smuggled onto a plane and carted around Salisbury etc before being placed on the door handle then dumped in a recycling bin!

But realised I was seeing it through the impact of the current lockdown.

We watched Chernobyl last week. In light of current events, it was a real headfuck!

I understood that Charlie found the bottle earlier and then gave it to Dawn few months later.

I don't quite get the sealed bottle part of it, there are many questions that could be asked about this. Poor, poor victims, it's such a crazy and horrible thing to happen.

Based on a dramatisation @GetOffYourHighHorse you've decided the public health official was emotional and unprofessional? The bloody police didn't want to do as she advised and it was only when they realised the extent of the contamination that they properly listened to her. It's not unprofessional to care that you may have missed something leading to someone's death down the line. One of the senior police officers said to her that it was thanks to her only one person had died, not many more. As for being emotional - being sleep deprived with huge responsibility and unable to discuss what you're doing with your close family is not something I would wish on anybody.

'you've decided the public health official was emotional and unprofessional?'

Yes I'm presuming they met with the people that the drama was based on to find out how they felt and how it impacted? The public health professional has been interviewed on the TV regarding the drama and didn't say it was inaccurate or that she didn't keep crying.

I'm so sorry for the victims and the local residents, it must have been terrifying, but as I said it was disturbing to see how it was dealt with by local inexperienced people. I wonder if lessons have been learnt? It didn't say.

If anybody brings nerve agents into the country and use them I would have hoped and expected there would be experienced professionals and their teams to deal with it.

@DobbyTheHouseElk

Scary how they managed to get a bottle of novachok on a domestic airline and all the way to Salisbury.

I've carried a bottle of perfume in my checked in luggage many times it has never aroused any suspicion. An unsealed bottle could also be carried in hand luggage if less than 100ml, I've done that many times too. Nobody checks the contents.

I thought it was well done and interesting, I was wrung out by the end and seeing Dawn dancing with her daughter was particularly emotional.

Tracey's son was annoying and both parents should have told him to pack it in and stop being so selfish imo. I have a dd a similar age and obviously it's hard balancing work vs her needs but she's old enough to start realising the whole world does not revolve around her!

I'd of liked to have seen more support for the policeman who seemed to be suffering from PTSD. It's a miracle his wife and daughters weren't affected by the poison.

Given how deadly the stuff is it's also remarkable that only poor Dawn died. From memory I thought the Russian spy had died as well, I wonder what they did with him afterwards?