In spite of Pensman's above evaluation of this episode and series, it is a fine piece of 'fiction.' The acting is extremely good, especially, from Rhys Ifans as the protagonist, Michael Dunne. Because of the time taken to carve out the story, the characters are given very good depth and are all believable. The dysfunction of the victim's family is well and, yet, subtly displayed as it is allowed to unfold and become evident. We witness the victim's mother's dilemma as she begins to awaken to reality but suppresses the truth. The very reasons quoted above in the review by Pensman as making this episode and series flawed is, actually, the very strength of the production. People in real life are sentenced to prison far too often and, sadly, more often than we realize on shoddy, circumstantial evidence. Over zealous cops with tunnel vision do exist, often. And, in the end, we still do not know what is the truth - although, one can reasonably come to either decision on one side of the fence or the other. That is the strength and the talent of this production. No, it is not CSI. It's a one-star better.
Trial & Retribution (TV Series)
Trial & Retribution I - Part One (1997)
User Reviews
Review this title5 Reviews
A bleak, but good start.
Sleepin_Dragon27 July 2021
A little girl goes missing from a play area outside of her home, a huge search is mounted for her, there is no shortage of potential suspects.
It's a very good first episode, it's intensely bleak, and a story that will definitely be upsetting and uncomfortable for many, some of the content is pretty harrowing. For me, the show got better as it went on, but this first one sets the scene, and gives you an idea of what's to come.
It holds up well, I am revisiting this 24 years on, and it doesn't look dated, the story is perhaps darker than you'd get now, the only thing that looks old fashioned, the split camera scenes, the show was one of the first I can remember to do it.
The best scene has to be the entrance of Walker, the acting here in general is phenomenal, however the first time we see David Hayman, you are instantly aware of his huge charisma.
Rhys Ifsns is incredible, what a career he would have after this.
Bleak, gritty, and sadly realistic, 8/10.
It's a very good first episode, it's intensely bleak, and a story that will definitely be upsetting and uncomfortable for many, some of the content is pretty harrowing. For me, the show got better as it went on, but this first one sets the scene, and gives you an idea of what's to come.
It holds up well, I am revisiting this 24 years on, and it doesn't look dated, the story is perhaps darker than you'd get now, the only thing that looks old fashioned, the split camera scenes, the show was one of the first I can remember to do it.
The best scene has to be the entrance of Walker, the acting here in general is phenomenal, however the first time we see David Hayman, you are instantly aware of his huge charisma.
Rhys Ifsns is incredible, what a career he would have after this.
Bleak, gritty, and sadly realistic, 8/10.
Trial & Retribution I - Part One
Prismark1023 June 2021
Lynda La Plante buoyed by the success of Prime Suspect turns to a gritty procedural that owes a little to Law & Order.
The first episode sees the police searching for missing five year old Julie Harris. She is later found dead and the main suspect turns out to be Michael Dunn (Rhys Ifans) who is regarded as a bit of weirdo.
The case is led by a gruff veteran Det. Supt. Michael Walker (David Hayman) assisted by Det. Insp. Pat North (Kate Buffery.)
Walker thinks that Dunn is the killer but he needs forensic evidence.
However before the police closed in on Dunn. Julie's stepfather was in the frame and Julie's brother is also acting erratically.
At two hours in length it was too long. The set up being a typical grimy council house underclass. It has an early role for actress Helen McCrory who plays Julie's mother.
Ifans plays Dunn in an eccentric manner. It emerges that Dunn was a victim of childhood abuse, on booze and maybe childlike himself with some form of mental illness.
There was nothing groundbreaking in the way Prime Suspect was. The second episode would be more courtroom based as the police find out if there evidence stacks up.
The first episode sees the police searching for missing five year old Julie Harris. She is later found dead and the main suspect turns out to be Michael Dunn (Rhys Ifans) who is regarded as a bit of weirdo.
The case is led by a gruff veteran Det. Supt. Michael Walker (David Hayman) assisted by Det. Insp. Pat North (Kate Buffery.)
Walker thinks that Dunn is the killer but he needs forensic evidence.
However before the police closed in on Dunn. Julie's stepfather was in the frame and Julie's brother is also acting erratically.
At two hours in length it was too long. The set up being a typical grimy council house underclass. It has an early role for actress Helen McCrory who plays Julie's mother.
Ifans plays Dunn in an eccentric manner. It emerges that Dunn was a victim of childhood abuse, on booze and maybe childlike himself with some form of mental illness.
There was nothing groundbreaking in the way Prime Suspect was. The second episode would be more courtroom based as the police find out if there evidence stacks up.
Quite disappointed
Raiyine5 April 2019
Warning: Spoilers
Writing this review is so very hard because I don't want to give away plot information to someone who hasn't seen the show before, but I had to say something after reading that positive review, where the writer spent more time writing about how the other reviewer was wrong, rather than reviewing the story.
The show starts out with a young Julie Harris playing on the playground outside of the apartment block her family lives in. They say "with other children" throughout the show, but really she just happened to be in the vicinity, because every time you saw her, she was playing by herself. Different events happen over the next couple of hours (their time, not ours), which we see through the eyes of different characters, up until Julie's mother (Anita) asks her live-in boyfriend (Peter) to go get the kids. That's when they realize that she's nowhere to be found, and start out looking for her themselves before calling in the police.
Once the police get there, it's dark and raining, which makes finding her, or anything that ties to her, almost impossible. (There were several times during this beginning part that I wondered why the police officers were not equipped with flashlights.) And it's around this time that I start getting really angry with the show.
The next day, once the weather clears up, one of the police officers just happens to come across a key piece of evidence, and then her body, which is located nearby. He immediately has a nervous breakdown, which, to be honest, is the only time I saw strong emotion of sadness in the show that I felt was believable.
Now that it's officially a murder, DS Michael Walker gets called in, and DI Pat North, who was on the case from the beginning, works at his side, combining both his team and hers to find the killer.
From almost the very beginning of their investigation, they believe that Michael Dunn is the guilty man, with really no evidence at all. In fact, they have him pegged as the killer before they even met him, and they allowed the information about him being a possible suspect to get out to other people in the story, and don't seem to really do anything to stop those people from attempting to act violently towards Dunn. (Because they believed he was guilty and deserved it?) What pissed me off the most about the whole case was the way he became the prime suspect, when there were others that acted pretty guilty, and they did it because two ladies they questioned repeated to a couple of different police officers that he should be questioned, one of them even saying that she's angry that he got an apartment there when one of her family members did not. Biased? It just seemed too easy. And rather early, considering it wasn't even halfway through the first part.
From then on, nothing else mattered, and the entire 3+ hours seemed to be of making their case fit their suspect rather than making their suspect fit their case. Even when their case started falling apart, and they found out that evidence they had wasn't what they thought it was, they were still dead-set on him being the killer, and only kinda maybe sorta looked at someone else.
With all the time spent on the characters of the story, you would have expected to know at least something about them, but really you only got vague hints about their lives, and all of the characters seemed very one-dimensional.
Dunn was not really a likable character, and when we first met him, he was clearly the drunk that the neighbors had claimed him to be. It wasn't until they cleaned him up some, and he hadn't been drinking for awhile, that I got a creep-vibe from him, though, and that was towards female adults, not towards children. In fact, throughout the whole show, he was very adamant that he was innocent of the crime. He also didn't want people that he knew who were being questioned in court to be hurt, and especially cared for several women that had been in different parts of his life.
Julie's family was not likable at all, and I felt so sorry for both her, her brother, and the baby (who suddenly disappeared from taping because we no longer heard the baby crying or even saw the baby after the grandmother got pissed at the young boy for hurting it). There was obvious abuse in the house, but even after the police noticed that, and the lies started becoming obvious, they never did really look at the boyfriend. And I hated the mother throughout the entire thing - the way she didn't watch her children, the way she treated the son, the way she lied for her boyfriend, the way she defended him to her mother, the way she kept her mouth shut, the way she never once questioned the lies she was being made to tell and the evidence she was being made to get rid of, and oh so many other things - which made it hard for me to feel sorry for her at all. The police never questioned the brother, who was outside with his friends and supposed to be watching her. Not about the anger he clearly had (that we saw a few times), not about the bruises and welts they saw on his body, not about what happened outside. They never spoke to him once. And he kept putting himself in the room, I can only think hoping they would notice him, but he got angrily kicked out every time by either his mother or the boyfriend. Who was a drunk. Who was angry... so very angry. (Another thing I hated about the show is that the father of both the son and daughter came back for the funeral, upset about the death of his daughter, but then he disappears, leaving his son in this house. Did he not care about him at all?)
The end... wasn't really an ending. There were so many questions unanswered that I couldn't believe in the ending at all. Now, I know that there are a lot of shows that leave things open, but everything? The only thing we got was a guilty verdict, but even that has to be questioned, what with all the other things we witnessed throughout the show. I'm not saying that I believe he was innocent. I'm just saying that I don't believe in the evidence that found him guilty, the evidence that made his lawyer believe he was lying the whole time, and the whole investigation itself. Which makes it impossible for me to continue on with the series.
I did want to add that I especially love the way they filmed the show and put it all together. At several points, you saw different things happening all at once, whether it be current and past events, to help remind you of what you saw, or of current events happening at the same time. I wish more shows did that. It definitely helped keep my interest when other things made me want to turn the show off, no longer caring about who killed the poor girl.
The show starts out with a young Julie Harris playing on the playground outside of the apartment block her family lives in. They say "with other children" throughout the show, but really she just happened to be in the vicinity, because every time you saw her, she was playing by herself. Different events happen over the next couple of hours (their time, not ours), which we see through the eyes of different characters, up until Julie's mother (Anita) asks her live-in boyfriend (Peter) to go get the kids. That's when they realize that she's nowhere to be found, and start out looking for her themselves before calling in the police.
Once the police get there, it's dark and raining, which makes finding her, or anything that ties to her, almost impossible. (There were several times during this beginning part that I wondered why the police officers were not equipped with flashlights.) And it's around this time that I start getting really angry with the show.
The next day, once the weather clears up, one of the police officers just happens to come across a key piece of evidence, and then her body, which is located nearby. He immediately has a nervous breakdown, which, to be honest, is the only time I saw strong emotion of sadness in the show that I felt was believable.
Now that it's officially a murder, DS Michael Walker gets called in, and DI Pat North, who was on the case from the beginning, works at his side, combining both his team and hers to find the killer.
From almost the very beginning of their investigation, they believe that Michael Dunn is the guilty man, with really no evidence at all. In fact, they have him pegged as the killer before they even met him, and they allowed the information about him being a possible suspect to get out to other people in the story, and don't seem to really do anything to stop those people from attempting to act violently towards Dunn. (Because they believed he was guilty and deserved it?) What pissed me off the most about the whole case was the way he became the prime suspect, when there were others that acted pretty guilty, and they did it because two ladies they questioned repeated to a couple of different police officers that he should be questioned, one of them even saying that she's angry that he got an apartment there when one of her family members did not. Biased? It just seemed too easy. And rather early, considering it wasn't even halfway through the first part.
From then on, nothing else mattered, and the entire 3+ hours seemed to be of making their case fit their suspect rather than making their suspect fit their case. Even when their case started falling apart, and they found out that evidence they had wasn't what they thought it was, they were still dead-set on him being the killer, and only kinda maybe sorta looked at someone else.
With all the time spent on the characters of the story, you would have expected to know at least something about them, but really you only got vague hints about their lives, and all of the characters seemed very one-dimensional.
Dunn was not really a likable character, and when we first met him, he was clearly the drunk that the neighbors had claimed him to be. It wasn't until they cleaned him up some, and he hadn't been drinking for awhile, that I got a creep-vibe from him, though, and that was towards female adults, not towards children. In fact, throughout the whole show, he was very adamant that he was innocent of the crime. He also didn't want people that he knew who were being questioned in court to be hurt, and especially cared for several women that had been in different parts of his life.
Julie's family was not likable at all, and I felt so sorry for both her, her brother, and the baby (who suddenly disappeared from taping because we no longer heard the baby crying or even saw the baby after the grandmother got pissed at the young boy for hurting it). There was obvious abuse in the house, but even after the police noticed that, and the lies started becoming obvious, they never did really look at the boyfriend. And I hated the mother throughout the entire thing - the way she didn't watch her children, the way she treated the son, the way she lied for her boyfriend, the way she defended him to her mother, the way she kept her mouth shut, the way she never once questioned the lies she was being made to tell and the evidence she was being made to get rid of, and oh so many other things - which made it hard for me to feel sorry for her at all. The police never questioned the brother, who was outside with his friends and supposed to be watching her. Not about the anger he clearly had (that we saw a few times), not about the bruises and welts they saw on his body, not about what happened outside. They never spoke to him once. And he kept putting himself in the room, I can only think hoping they would notice him, but he got angrily kicked out every time by either his mother or the boyfriend. Who was a drunk. Who was angry... so very angry. (Another thing I hated about the show is that the father of both the son and daughter came back for the funeral, upset about the death of his daughter, but then he disappears, leaving his son in this house. Did he not care about him at all?)
The end... wasn't really an ending. There were so many questions unanswered that I couldn't believe in the ending at all. Now, I know that there are a lot of shows that leave things open, but everything? The only thing we got was a guilty verdict, but even that has to be questioned, what with all the other things we witnessed throughout the show. I'm not saying that I believe he was innocent. I'm just saying that I don't believe in the evidence that found him guilty, the evidence that made his lawyer believe he was lying the whole time, and the whole investigation itself. Which makes it impossible for me to continue on with the series.
I did want to add that I especially love the way they filmed the show and put it all together. At several points, you saw different things happening all at once, whether it be current and past events, to help remind you of what you saw, or of current events happening at the same time. I wish more shows did that. It definitely helped keep my interest when other things made me want to turn the show off, no longer caring about who killed the poor girl.
Not CSI and not close
pensman21 January 2011
Warning: Spoilers
The problem with this episode, if not the series, is that the police have decided who is guilty and stop looking for potential subjects. As the story of the murdered girl unfolds there is the possibility her mother's live in boy friend did it; there is a slightly older brother who disliked his sister and seemingly resented her; and there is the mother who knows there is evidence that could make the abusive live in look quite guilty but she is not forthcoming regarding it. And then there is a jury trial that finds the suspect guilty on nothing but circumstantial evidence. The real mystery for me is how this series lasted as long as it did. Maybe it's a British thing but this show is not in the same class as Midsommer Murders or A Touch of Frost. I say pass.
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