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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 335663" data-attributes="member: 23"> She’s Out Episodes Five and Six continued It’s been a nice touch that there are ties to the earlier series. Familial ties to Shirley, for example, have brought a welcome sense of history to the series. However, what She’s Out has lacked is a sense of being a truly multi-layered story seen from numerous perspectives. Mike being Shirley’s brother is really the only interesting thing about him, and so the police procedural element is lacking. Despite seeing more of his home life than we ever did George Resnick, Mike doesn’t gain the viewer’s interest and empathy in the way Resnick did. In the first two series, Resnick’s obsessive hunt proved as interesting as the women’s stories and could easily have stood on its own as a series that would interest. The same cannot be said for Mike. Adrian Rawlins seems a decent enough actor, and he’s certainly not been short of work since 1995 (he went on to play Harry Potter’s dad among numerous other screen appearances, and has an impressive theatre CV as long as your arm) but it’s a fairly thankless role that feels rather by-numbers compared with previous cops we’ve seen.There were some very effective moments in the preparation for the heist, and the story was decent enough. Because it had all happened in the last couple of episodes, though, it all kind of flew by to the point that the heist itself almost felt like a rehearsal and I didn’t feel invested enough. To be fair, this was written into the dialogue, with the date needing to be brought forward due to an upcoming change in train schedules forcing them to go in sooner than planned and with less preparation.As said, I didn’t feel overly invested in the heist, and I disliked some of the dialogue that felt as though it was telling us what we could see “Oh no. Whatserface the Marilyn wannabe is trapped in a sinking carriage”. “Oh look. Dolly’s going in to help her”. It felt a bit Widows For Dummies. Still, despite its flaws, it worked well enough as a last hoorah, and the women all getting home, dissolving the mailbags, vacuuming up the money with a garden leaf-sucker thingy and hastily donning nightwear for the police’s imminent arrival was low key thrilling.Unfortunately, two further external factors affected my investment in the final scenes: the landline rang loudly with just three or four minutes remaining. Since it was after 9pm (emergency calling hours only in the O’Drama home) it was answered and turned out to be just a social call. While the call was taken, tiredness hit me after a long day and between the two factors I never really got back into the episode on the same level and so after eighteen hours’ investment, the finale didn’t quite have the impact it should have.I genuinely had no idea how Dolly’s story would turn out this time round, but her demise was certainly on the table as a possibility. What I didn’t count on, however, was the way Dolly’s fate actually turned out to be the result of a sitcom style misunderstanding where someone overhears only part of a conversation and gets the wrong end of the stick. I really liked that it could be viewed that there’s a degree of ambiguity around whether Ester deliberately misunderstood and grabbed this chance to punish Dolly for usurping Ester’s position as the alpha. Whatever the case, I’m certain she would have responded differently had she overheard the same conversation with a different woman from Dolly.I suspect I would have found the final scenes quite moving had the interruption not happened and had I been less tired. But even in the circumstances it was satisfying enough.One final word about the closing song, Widow’s Tears, written by one Richard La Plante(!) and powerfully sung by Lorraine Crosby (I didn't recognise the name, but a search of the interwebs tells me she's best-known for singing with Meatloaf on I'd Do Anything For Love). It's a great song, and a perfect fit for this series lyrically: certainly a huge step up from the Eighties synth number at the end of the 1985 series which felt most malapropos. Why can't I find it anywhere online?!Anyway I’ll still take Stanley Myers’s haunting instrumental them from the original over them both. And what better way to end my Widows journey than to drop it here: [MEDIA=youtube]8KtBgNNwNHk[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

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