Inside Man–Incarceration or Cancellation?

A dramatic four-episode mini-series by Steven Moffat (Doctor Who creator), Inside Man was released on Netflix October 31.

There are two parallel plots:  Former law professor Jefferson Grieff (Stanley Tucci) is on death row for strangling and beheading his wife.  A brilliant Hannibal Lecter-style genius for solving cold cases, he waits execution.  The second plot involves an English vicar Harry Watling (David Tennant who played Doctor Who) and his wife Mary (Lindsey Marshal). The vicar reluctantly accepts a flash drive from the deeply disturbed verger (vicar’s attendant) who wants to hide it from his mother.  All chaos soon breaks out.

The series opens with a journalist on a subway station being harassed by a belligerent man.  A woman bravely starts filming his aggression towards fellow passengers, claiming (falsely) that he is being recorded live and broadcast on Facebook.

This is where the confusion begins in tying the two plots together. The Death Row Grieff is asked to help solve the case of the disappearance of a woman. No spoiler alerts here–but the interweaving and flashbacks begin and so does a bit of whiplash.

This dramatic thriller’s main theme–albeit not fully argued in Inside Man–raises an interesting question: Are we all capable of murder? Above all, what will a father do to protect his own child?

Vicar Harry descends into a desperate, criminal mind–paralleling what Grieff gloats about in prison.  The crime is solved but the motivation is still left amorphous and unconvincing. For the ominous premise about human nature’s capacity for violence, things are left unsaid: especially the father-son dynamic, providing the motivation for homicide. The vicar seems to have  had a troublesome relationship with his son, as obliquely hinted in several scenes.  Was he neglectful, patronizing, judgmental?  Maybe the son has learning disabilities–dyscalculia?– and therefore needed a math tutor?  Perhaps the vicar was impatient, even ashamed of the son?  And so he is trying to redeem himself for his past failures as a father?

While Inside Man raises probative questions about the deeply suppressed, violent,  dark aspects of human nature often denied and unacknowledged,  this series fails to provide sufficient motivation on the part of the main characters to make sense of the difficult and ambivalent decision-making they feel compelled to.  Everyone is making bad decisions–and good people often do make bad decisions in order to survive.  This viewer needed to know why.  Why did  they feel  they had to do what they least wanted to do?

Availability:  Netflix streaming