Channel 5’s The Game, which is now available in the US via BritBox, stars some very talented actors and kicks off with a promising premise. Then it squanders all of this on a preposterous plot that resembles nothing so much as swiss cheese by the end. Supposedly intelligent characters behave in spectacularly stupid ways. It’s further dragged down by far too many irritating genre tropes to count. Spoilers ahead.
The Game is basically a “game of cat and mouse” between two men, one an ex-cop and one almost certainly the elusive serial killer known as the Ripton Stalker.
Jason Watkins plays Huw Miller, a man who we learn went through something of a nervous breakdown in his hunt for the killer. He retires, though the failure to apprehend the true killer (compounded by the arrest of the wrong man) still haunts him. He lives with his wife, Alice (Sunetra Sarker). His relationship with his daughter, Margot (Indy Lewis) is strained from the years spent on the investigation.
Robson Green plays Patrick Harbottle, a charming repairman who moves in across the street after the sudden death – ruled a suicide, but very suspect – of Huw’s friend and neighbor, Frank (Gordon Kennedy).
Huw and Patrick hit it off at first, but when they part from a night of drinks, Patrick says “Catch you later,” echoing the words the serial killer uttered to Huw when the detective nearly caught him three years prior. From here on out, Huw begins to investigate Patrick, convinced that he’s the Ripton Stalker. Patrick, meanwhile, begins ingratiating himself with the neighbors and with Alice, and later Margot.
The setup is pretty compelling, but what follows is a mess. Let’s go over some of the many, many ways this show drops the proverbial ball.
Huw Is A Terrible Detective
Huw is supposed to be a genius detective. We see an example of this in a pub scene when his friend, Paul (Scott Karim) asks him to do his “trick” which is to basically see every detail in a room and commit it to memory. He’s able to describe everything going on, the other patrons and so forth without looking. But Huw is not a very good detective at all. At one point he’s talking to the man wrongfully accused of being the Stalker who lets slip a key clue that I picked up on immediately. Huw missed this very obvious clue until much later, when replaying a recording of their conversation. Huw is such a bumbling nincompoop, you begin to wonder why Patrick ever bothered to torment him in the first place.
Worse, Huw is a total mess all the time. When his wife and daughter confront him about going off the deep end, he stutters and stammers and makes excuses and falls all over himself to apologize. He seems so nutty and unhinged that it’s unsurprising when his family and neighbors, and even his former police colleagues, think he’s lost his marbles.
Huw is also a terrible planner, placing himself in dangerous situations for no discernible reason, refusing to ask for help or call the police at times when calling the police is the most glaringly obvious move, and generally not communicating with anyone. I began to intensely dislike Huw by the third episode, frustrated as more and more of these issues piled up. Huw comes across as weak, desperate and clueless. I remember thinking, it’s rare to watch a detective show starring someone so bad at their job. But annoyance soon turned into something else. Soon enough, I found myself despising the man.
Huw Gets People Killed For No Reason
You see, Huw is responsible for the deaths of two innocents over the course of the 4-part miniseries. Patrick sticks the blade in, but only after Huw set the table. When he visits a former victim of the Ripton Stalker, Ruth Parker (Christina Bennington), who he once saved, his only purpose is to use her, in spite of her clear affection for him and the trauma she’s suffered.
In a baffling act of rash manipulation, he brings Ruth to Patrick’s repair shop without warning her what he’s up to, all so that he can determine whether or not she recognizes her assailant (which she doesn’t, though she discovers what Huw is up to and gets justifiably furious and distraught). Of course, the act of placing Ruth back in Patrick’s orbit is wildly irresponsible and dangerous, and Huw never once thinks of the consequences. It’s no surprise when the killer pays Ruth a tragic visit.
Huw also, though more indirectly, gets his friend Paul killed. Paul is pretty much the only one of Huw’s neighbors not to lap up all the glaringly obvious gossip that Patrick is poisoning the well with, and he warns his friend. Everyone else immediately believes the new guy and turns on Huw. Patrick is certainly slick and charming, but his story hardly passes muster. He convinces his neighbors that Huw must be the one entering their homes, since he stumbled into Patrick’s house in a drunken stupor one night.
Nevermind the fact that, in the other instances, objects were moved around, stereos are turned on and the intruder never shows his face. Nevermind that this is obviously the work of someone acting deliberately, stealthily and with obvious malice – not a drunk stumbling into their homes. Everyone but Paul just goes along for the ride. Paul offers to help Huw, instead, and when Patrick finds out he kills Patrick and frames Huw.
Patrick Is A Terrible Serial Killer
The problem with the frame is how wildly implausible the whole thing is. Patrick uses a knife from Huw’s house and puts Huw’s initials on the case that Paul stole, making it look like Huw was trying to retrieve the briefcase (which Patrick filled with pictures of Ruth) and killed Paul to get it back. I’m not sure why he would do this in broad daylight, with the door open to the street with people all around, if he was trying to cover up another murder, but none of the incompetent police ever bother to ask that question.
There are other issues: For instance, how did Patrick know that Paul would steal the briefcase to begin with? How did he know that Huw would be the one to find the body, or that Huw would be stupid enough to immediately contaminate the crime scene and get Paul’s blood all over his clothes and hands and face? So many moving pieces and possible things that could go wrong, but it all just slides conveniently into place.
Patrick is also a frustrating character. He’s supposed to be this mastermind serial killer, always one step ahead, always so smart and devious and charismatic. But his manipulation skills are amateurish at best, and the fact that almost all of his plans go off without a hitch is pretty far-fetched. He’s able to sneak into peoples’ houses without ever being seen, turn on music upstairs and then vanish downstairs like a ghost.
He’s able to easily dupe the police into arresting Huw and very nearly “disappears” Margot when she rather stupidly goes to his shop to snoop around (not knowing that one of Patrick’s magic powers is the ability to show up whenever someone is at his house or shop). Margot is saved by DS Jenny Atkins (Amber James) who shows up in the nick of time, though Patrick could have easily still killed them both.
The Nagging Wife Trope Is Getting Old
Another genre trope that I am sick to death of is the “nagging wife of detective” bit, in which a spouse spends most of their time berating their police or detective partner for doing their job. Whether or not that’s realistic, it just gets old. I liked Alice for the most part, and I’m glad that she and Margot came around before Huw could prove Patrick’s guilt.
But so much of these four episodes is spent in some form of argument that boils down to Alice and/or Margot saying “How could you put us through this again, don’t you know how crazy you sound, if you continue with this, we’re done!” They even kick him out of the house (and instead of getting a hotel for a couple of nights like a normal person, he first gets drunk and spends the night at Patrick’s, and then starts sleeping in his car). The nagging wife, the angry daughter and the spineless detective. What a triumvirate of irritation. Can’t we just have a detective show where the spouse is supportive and has made their peace with their partner’s line of work?
Margot, meanwhile, feels more like a plot device than an actual character. She’s here to give viewers some teenage angst and remind us that Huw made some big mistakes in the past. Margot is angry about that, but she comes around as her and her mother begin to realize that Huw was right the whole time. Many characters serve largely as plot devices in The Game, but it’s especially frustrating that Margot and her relationship with her father isn’t fleshed out more.
There is a lot of ground not covered here, but the long and short of it is, this cat-and-mouse thriller is too predictable and its two main leads are a rather lousy detective and an equally unimpressive killer. Both of them think of themselves as very clever, and the show seems to want you to think of them that way, too, but they’re not. Huw just spazzes out most of the time, and Patrick is incredibly transparent and succeeds more because of luck and the stupidity of others rather than his own intellect.
At the same time, there were aspects of the show that I enjoyed. The first two episodes were much better than the third and fourth.
But a good start never really makes up for a bad ending. The final confrontation made little sense. Patrick returning so soon after his escape is just another boneheaded move from this supposedly patient, brilliant psychopath. Huw just waiting for him without involving the police or having really any plan whatsoever is just as silly. Patrick drives his dagger into Huw’s chest just as the cops show.
He’s arrested and the cops just . . . leave Huw to bleed out in his wife’s arms. The two of them sit and chat quite calmy, while not a single police officer even attempts first aid while waiting for medics to arrive. I wonder what part of Huw’s chest was actually stabbed, since the blade missed the heart and apparently the lungs and pretty much every other internal organ.
Does Huw die in the end? If so, it feels like a rather cruel and pointless ending, and it abdicates him from dealing with all the wreckage he created. Does he survive? If so, what was the point of having him stabbed to begin with? The cops could have just shown up and arrested Patrick in time. Patrick gets one last lingering shot in the back of the police car, smiling contentedly in the dark. But at this point, I suppose I don’t really care if Huw lives or dies, or what happens with Patrick – a one-trick pony serial killer at best. Thank goodness this was only four episodes.
There are better things to watch on BritBox including the excellent Irish police drama, Blue Lights, and the phenomenal British crime drama, Happy Valley.
