Down Cemetery Road [SPOILERS]

[LushLemonTart]

Is there a thread yet?

Just finished watching the second episode. Wow it's good. I always love the leads anyway and yes it was a bit predictable but am hooked.

It's helped fill the Slow horses hole. Absolutely loved that. Tense ending but so clever.

Amos is pretty terrifying, actually - that dead blank look behind his eyes is pretty effectively psychopathic. I never thought watching someone watching Keeping Up Appearances could be so alarming.

His absolute stillness as the hitmen crept stealthily up the stairs was simultaneously terrifying and hilarious.

And I spent a minute or two wondering whether his tears yesterday were extreme getting into character, or whether he really felt … The latter is obviously the more interesting interpretation- but I really don’t know!

No he doesn't feel 🤣

He plays such a good baddie he should be a Bond villain.

I've just watched a couple of eps.

In the first, when RW stops her bike to avoid hitting the little girl, who is playing the Mum who appears?

Is it the woman who is cast as Lucy?

I enjoyed the first few episodes but it's feeling very drawn out now. I do perk up every time Emma Thompson is in screen, because she's fabulous, and I do like her and Ruth Wilson together. The hitman is brilliant, really scary. Other than that, meh

Amos (or the actor) did nothing for me at all but I enjoyed that episode because of the scenes Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson shared together.

I looked up the street name we saw in the ‘Scottish’ village and it looks like it was actually filmed in Polperro in Cornwall. And they got on the sleeper train to Scotland at King’s Cross when it goes from Euston. I find these really annoying!

So Amos suddenly becomes a crap shooter? Nonsense

I knew it wasn’t Scotland! It looked very inauthentic to me. And the ‘highlander’ on the boat being manipulated into helping them just to get one over on ‘the English’ 🙄🙄🤦‍♀️. Very cringy.

DH and I are persisting but only because everything else we like to watch has finished.

@rickyrickygrimes totally agree re the boatman. Dh said do you think Zoe will end up with him? I laughed and said she'd never go for someone that daft. How easily manipulated was he. Yes very cringe.
I haven't really enjoyed this and am just sticking with it too. Shame as I had high hope before it started.

is the boat man Billy Elliott’s dad or just looks like him?

Yes - the wonderful Gary Lewis.

I agree it’s all very silly. I’m not entirely convinced by Emma Thompson as an action hero but full marks to her anyway.

I can’t believe how generally dull this is. I didn’t feel anything when Downey was murdered.

Have given up on it. It started well but it's so implausible and makes no sense. So they all find boats and know how to sail them? No indication (unless I missed it) as to how Ruth Wilson and ex soldier worked out where in Scotland Dinah is being held. Supposedly they are holding Dinah to trap the ex soldier, but why don't 'they' just try to track him down? And why hide Dinah if they want to entice him to her? Why is Ruth Wilson character so invested anyway, she's never even met Dinah. Adeel Akhtar's character is so incompetent, can't believe this wouldn't have been noticed before.

Rant over! It's really annoyed me as a series.

I don't think thrillers work so well when comedic characters are introduced, I.e. the Scottish boatman, the Asian sidekick, it takes away from the tension of the piece and deflates it.

@Greenship I got stuck on why Ruth Wilson’s character was so fixated on the child too, but there are some explanations for it.

1. Her character is supposed to be very smart, but also ND and a bit prone to obsessiveness. There was a convo between Zoe and an Oxford prof who remembered her as a student when he describes her a super bright but prone to going done rabbit holes
2. Every time she pursued her fixation the reaction she got was so weird it was pretty much guaranteed to increase her focus. And the PI she went to was murdered and she found the body!

I am less bothered by how fixated she is, and more irritated by the crack handed shadowy forces that are doing such a bang up job of keeping her interested enough to keep going. Who the hell lets an out of control assassin run around killing whoever he feels like?

I felt that there was almost a bit of an anticlimax when they met. Compared to Michael being reunited with her.

Ruth Wilson looked like she suddenly remembered that she didn’t know her at all.

Why is Amos still after them now Michael is dead? Is he after Ruth because she killed his brother? Or Dinah? I’ve lost track.

Michael could have just given himself up after the fire and saved us all a lot of time.

Yes, it was filmed in Polperro not Scotland. They changed all the shop fronts and even the pub names. It was interesting to see the whole village as a TV set.

I was enjoying this up to the latest episode (7). Too much action, endless chasing, violence. I wanted more of a story & it feels like over kill. Actually bored with it now.

I skim-watched ep 7. Glad I was able to scroll quickly past poor Downey’s end; it makes no difference that he was dying anyway.

Ruth didn’t kill Amos’s brother - that was Downey. (Unless I’ve skimmed past new information!)

The Scottish boatman was Billy Elliot's father 😁

It looks nothing like Scotland which irritated me😁 building types, even the type of fishing boats !

Driving a motorised boat isn’t difficult in open sea. Piloting it is something else as they find out. Its a common enough scenario, people underestimate what is involved.

Mike was held on the island along with other victims of the chemical weapons and there were a number of reasons why he worked out that the MoD had taken the child to the secret MoD location. Its clearer in the book, I may be overlaying that book onto the tv series.

I’ve just caught up on this series and liked most of the casting. Even though they may not fit the physical descriptions from the book they are right in character. I like it so far but anyone expecting Slow Horses will be disappointed - its a very different series of books. I read the Zoe Boehms before the Slow Horses books and both before Slow Horses was televised and its fair to say that Slow Horses are fundamentally better books but Herron was a more experienced writer by a number of years/publications. The Zoe books could make a great series in their own right, they might have been best done completely separately rather than “from the author of Slow Horses”. Slow Horses also has the advantage of being a natural ensemble cast, the Zoe books are very much about the isolation of a PI.

From memory I think there are more tweaks in this adaptation but the books were written more than 20 years ago. I don’t see the problem distinguishing between Axel/Amos/Mike - all three look very different from each other.