In just the first episode of Season 2 of Tin Star, Amazon Prime’s dark police drama, almost all the major characters at some point look like goners.
As in dead, finished, lights out, game over. And for some, it is.
It’s going to be that kind of a season on Tin Star, a British series that resumes in the U.S. and Canada on Friday.
The new round of violence and death won’t surprise viewers of Season 1, though it remains remarkable how one tiny little Canadian border town like Little Big Bear can rack up a body count that rivals inner-city Baltimore’s.
The violence didn’t start with, but now does revolve around, Police Chief Jim Worth (Tim Roth), who came in from London with his wife Angela (Genevieve O’Reilly) and their two children Anna (Abigail Lawrie) and Peter (Rupert Turnbull).
As career moves go, this was definitely not a step up, nor was it the first choice of the family. The problem is, Jim was looking to get as far as possible from some bad things that happened with him in London.
Little Big Bear seemed to fit that bill, except for one tiny hitch. Jim brought the genesis of his problems with him.
That would be Jack Devlin, the name given to Jack’s alter ego, which surfaces when Jim starts to drink. Jack is as nasty and violent as Jim is calm and reasonable, and you can probably guess which of the two gets the most screen time.
By the end of Season 1, Jack had thrown grenades into pretty much all the lives around him, although to be fair these grim developments were not all his fault.
It turned out Little Big Bear’s primary employer and de facto ruler, North Stream Oil, was perpetrating some serious corporate sleight of hand, which brought the company into conflict with Chief Worth.
Some of this simply pitted Worth against Elizabeth Bradshaw (Christina Hendricks), North Stream’s vice president and chief mouthpiece.
Other times things got worse, much worse, culminating in an assassination attempt in which the most innocent of all parties, 5-year-old Peter, was killed.
The impact on the Worth family was predictably shattering, and Season 2 picks up where Season 1 left off, with the family facing a deadly standoff in a bone-chillingly cold Canadian forest.
While the resolution of that showdown stretches real-life credibility, it makes for exciting drama.
It also leads us to the second season’s big introduction, a strict Ammonite family led by the charismatic and suspicious Pastor Nickel (John Lynch). He, his daughter Rosa (Jenessa Grant) and the rest of the community further populate the already crowded roster of local residents who turn out to have an ambiguous relationship with the law.
However things ultimately work out for the Worth family, it seems indisputable that Jim made a serious miscalculation when he hauled his reluctant family halfway across the world to the middle of nowhere because he assumed they would find tranquility and harmony.
There’s more of that on The Walking Dead.