732 Edge of Darkness

First  viewed : 19  December  1985



I  couldn't  watch  the  original  run  of  this  political  thriller  on  BBC 2  due  to  the  domestic  situation  previously  described  but  I  was  aware  of  the  buzz  around  it  and  so  I  was  grateful  for  Michael  Grade's  decision  to  give  it  an  immediate  repeat  over  three  nights  at  the  start  of  the  Christmas  holidays.



Edge  of  Darkness  starts  with  the  brutal  murder  of  Emma  Craven  ( Joanne  Whalley )  an  environmental  activist  who  is  blown  off  her  feet  by  a  shotgun  blast  while  returning  home  with  her  father  Ronald. Ronald  is  a  taciturn  widowed  police  detective  and  his  colleagues believe  he  was  the  intended  target  after  his  stint  in  Northern  Ireland. Craven  however  does  his  own  investigating  leading  him  to  two  suave  civil  servants, Pendleton  and  Harcourt  ( Charles  Kay  and  Ian  McNeice ) who  tell  him  they  think  Emma  was  the  actual  target  after  she  led  a  raid  by  her  Gaia  group  on  a  nuclear  waste  facility  to  determine  whether  they  were  illegally  storing  plutonium. Harcourt  is  quite  upfront  about  using  Craven's  desire  for  truth  to  investigate  the  plant  for  themselves. The  CIA  are  also  interested  and  Craven  is  paired  up  with  larger  than  life  agent  Darius  Jedburgh  ( Joe  Don  Baker  )  to  raid  the  plant.



I  enjoyed  the  series  but  was  troubled  by  one  scene  which  I  couldn't  get  my  head  around. During  his  own  raid,  Craven  comes  across  the  drowned  bodies  of  the  Gaia  team  which  include  Emma  herself. Craven  exclaims  "They  all  drowned". I  could  accept  the  shooting  as  an  hallucination  but  Craven only  knows  every  other  character  as  a  direct  consequence  of  that  incident  so  is  the  whole  thing a  dream ? For  some  time  afterwards, I  went  trawling  bookshops  looking  for   a  novelisation  of  Troy  Kennedy  Martin's  script  to  answer  this  conundrum  but  to  no  avail.



The  series  was  lauded  across  the  board  and  many  years  later  became  a  feature  film  ( with   the  same  director ) starring  Mel  Gibson  which  I  haven't  seen. Both  Peck  and  McNeice  found  subsequent  work  in  Hollywood. Strangely, Kennedy  Martin  seemed  to  rest  on  his  laurels  after  the  series  and  produced  surprisingly  little  of  note in  subsequent years. He  died  in  2009.