CHRISTOPHER STEVENS critiques last night’s TV: A chaotic blend of horror flick, teen drama, and noir crime thriller

The Gone (BBC2)

Rating:

The spirit of The Sweeney lives on Down Under, where it isn’t wise to get cocky with the detectives. Even a sarcastic ‘No comment’ could earn you a thumping.

Richard Flood plays a modern-day Jack Regan as crime thriller The Gone returns, using his fists to interview suspects when his journalist girl- friend goes missing in the New Zealand mountains.

He’s a shaven-headed Irish copper called Theo Richter, at the tail end of an investigation after two backpackers from Eire were kidnapped. 

Thankfully, his sidekick isn’t a Dennis Waterman lookalike: that would be taking 1970s police brutality too far.

Instead, he’s teamed with a Maori police officer, Diana Huia (Acushla-Tara Kupe), who relishes beating up criminals as much as he does. When they sit down with a local thug called Frank Pastors (Owen Black), who is in jail for punching another policeman’s teeth out, there’s no tape recorder, no lawyer and no formalities.

Before Diana can say, ‘We’re the Sweeney, son, and we haven’t had our dinner,’ Richter has tipped the yob out of his chair and is kneeling on his chest with both hands round his throat. Steady on, guv.

If The Gone stuck to this straightforward format of summary justice, it might be entertaining. But it’s a disjointed mess of horror movie, teen drama, noir crime and anti-British preaching about colonialism.

In a rural town where the police chief urges residents to trust their neighbours and leave their doors unlocked at night, a demonic serial killer is on the prowl. He’s been around so long, he’s acquired a mythological nickname — the Goat-man.

Theo and Diana track him to a shack in the woods, where the walls are riddled with bullet holes and a charred goat skeleton is sprawled on the sofa. My first thought was that the Goat-man must have fallen asleep with a cigarette smouldering, but this was only the first of six episodes . . . and mass murderers don’t usually suffer accidental deaths so early on.

If you didn’t watch the first series, you’ll have trouble making much sense of the plot. Although the hunt for the missing journalist is a new storyline, most of the characters were more interested in tying up loose ends from the previous series — details that few viewers will care about, because they no longer matter.

The younger ones are all suffering from post-traumatic stress after the kidnapping, in which a drug dealer died. His girlfriend is mooching around, recording videos for social media, which is how Gen Z process their traumas.

Maori elders Wiki (Vanessa Rare) and Buster Huia (Wayne Hapi) are more upset about invasive species: ‘Deer and pigs, they root up the ground, eat all the native trees. Gifts from Queen Victoria . . . along with influenza and attempted genocide.’

With a bit of luck, the Goat-man will turn his attention to pigs and deer. Historic trauma fixed.