Criminal: United Kingdom, Season 2 is a 2020 British series.
10 out of 10 stars for Season 2. Season 1 was awful, but clearly they got their acts together.
Episode 1: Julia
In the first episode, the wife of a man arrested for two murders is interviewed. Eighteen minutes into the interview, she talks about the stress this has caused her family and the embarrassment . Then she offhandedly describes in detail how he murdered the two men, details she couldn’t know unless she was the killer. The interviewer doesn’t catch this, but the cop watching the interview does, pulls the case file, and tells her.
They take a break, arrest her, then re-interview her the next day. And this time the interviewer gets Julia to confess to murdering her husband’s two gay lovers.
Episode 2: Alex
In the second episode, two female roommates fund their vacations by accusing their bosses of rape. Alex is their latest victim and the police are grilling him until the cop watching the interview, and reading through the roommates’ text messages, comes across a text that says “Bungalow Reunion?” She looks through the roommate’s past and discovers exactly a year ago, the roommate accused her boss of rape, got a large settlement, and the two roommates funded their vacation in “Safari Bungalow” with that money.
They stop the interview and let him go, but Alex is furious. They publicly accused him of rape, came into his office and arrested him very publicly in front of his clients. He’s lost his girlfriend, his job, his clients, and his colleagues on a lie. He wants a letter from them stating that he is innocent. They tell him they don’t do that.
Episode 3: Danielle
In the third episode, a woman who runs a website that catches pedophiles is arrested for “improper communication online”, Britain’s equivalent of online defamation. The charge is in connection with her publicly outing Andrew Simmons as a pedophile. Danielle goes online, pretending to be a 14 year old girl, and waits for pedophiles in the chat room to contact her and send her photos. There is no entrapment, no leading questions. She literally waits for them to try to lure her then sends that information to the police. So far, she has aided the police in arresting 31 pedophiles.
After weeks of collecting graphic images and texts from a pedophile identifying himself as Andrew Simmons, she sends him a text that she is going to mail this information to 1. the police, 2. his wife’s parents, and 3. his boss. And she does.
Simmons is fired. His wife leaves him. His wife’s mother has a panic attack. And a group of girls beat up his daughter for having a pedophile for a dad. But the police use the information to trace the communications to Andrew’s office mate, Caspar Lindstrom, who was using Simmon’s name and computer. So really it’s not that Danielle screwed up. It’s that Simmons didn’t secure his computer and made it easy for a pedophile to use his identity. Considering how many credit card companies ruin people’s lives by posting debts that were a result of identity theft and walk away with no fines or criminal charges, that seems ridiculous.
0 out of 10 stars. I hated this episode. You should too.
Episode 4: Sandeep
This was the best of the season and the entire series. By far.
Sandeep is currently a convicted murderer serving time in prison for killing a woman who promised to invest in his business then didn’t. He freely admits to killing her. He’s brought in for questioning in the disappearance of Annabelle Ashcombe. A wedding photograph was taken of him in the same room as her six days before she went missing. He has an alibi. He was on a cruise ship.
They let him go, but the prison bus won’t pick him up for an hour. So he offers to solve a high profile crime. They rattle off a few and get to the name Alfie Ince. That gets his attention. And they’re shocked he knows something. They call a prosecutor to agree to give him four years off his sentence in exchange for “good reliable information on the murder of Alfie Ince.” Since he’s already served ten years of his fourteen year sentence and has only four years left, he will essentially be set free.
He tells them his first year in prison was in Brixton, a harsh neighborhood. Three cells down from him was a high end car thief named John Brian Buchannon who smuggled those cars on a route to Bulgaria. Sandeep, still trying to drum up investors for his businesses, asks about this route because he wants to use it. Buchannon tells him that more than just cars are smuggled on this route. Children, women, drugs, everything. Then he tells Sandeep he was paid 25,000 pounds to smuggle Alfie Ince, but along the route, Alfie started screaming and kicking the window and he had to kill him and bury him in a park along the road.
One of the men present for the interview is Hugo, who memorized the case of Alfie Ince. Sandeep makes the mistake of saying that Alfie was abducted from his home in Loughton. What the police never released was that he was actually abducted from his nan’s house in Thornwood just a few streets down from Sandeep’s main home. So Hugo exposes Sandeep as lying and they now charge him with being an accomplice to Alfie’s murder. They tell Sandeep if he gives them one or more high profile murderers, they’ll call it even and won’t charge him in Alfie’s murder.
At this point you have to wonder if this is what Sandeep wanted all along, a chance to confess. Because in their stupidity, that’s what they’ve given him–a get out of jail free card for confessing to all of his other murders. And that’s what he does. He tells them he was at that wedding with Ashcombe and she offered to invest half a million pounds in his business. Then she backed out. He got angry and killed her then was burying her body in his backyard when a football came over the fence. A little boy, Alfie Ince, came running into his backyard to get the football and saw Ashley Ashcombe. So Sandeep killed him and buried him in the backyard too.
This is one of those wow moments. It’s all in the details. And this is precisely why no cops or prosecutors should offer criminals leniency or immunity from prosecution for giving them criminals, because they lie, lie, lie.
10 out of 10 stars for Season 2. Don’t bother with season 1. It’s pretty bad.
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