The Silent Witness team are in Zambia for the last story of the series and they pulled it off rather well.
Nikki is contacted by an old school friend, Peter Ellis, who runs a mining business in Zambia, after the daughter of one of his work colleague’s went missing and her bones where found. With the only pathologist away, the team are drafted in to try and establish what had happened to Rachel, the missing girl.
As soon as they arrive, they encounter bandits and robbed of a few of their personal affects. They meet everyone who knew Rachel, who was a doctor at a Christian mission. Nobody seems to know what happened to her but they all look shifty! And when Nikki establish that the bones found where not Rachel’s, the plot thickens.
After Harry saves a young journalist friend of Rachel’s, after he is run down, things look all the more suspicious. But the lad dies, whilst he is recovering – later we find out he was injected with heroin.
As Rachel’s dad is getting all the more desperate, another one of Rachel’s friends, the daughter of the people who run the mission, turns up dead, although this is found out to be an accident. The girl had earlier used Rachel’s credit card to book an hotel room and everyone thought that Rachel was alive, so imagine their surprise!
Later, as Leo is tracing Rachel’s last job – testing water for signs of disease, Harry and Nikki spot that their clothes have been sold on. They question the villagers and eventually they are led to their last known whereabouts – the scene of Rachel’s death.
Uranium was discovered by the mining company and Peter had tried to hush it up, as the Zambian government wouldn’t allow it to be mined. But when a spillage of uranium found its way into the local water supply, people contracted a host of diseases and many women had lost their babies.
Rachel was investigating this and when she found that the water was contaminated with uranium, she tries to tell her Dad but when Peter found out, he had some of his men chase her. Although he didn’t mean for her to be killed, she had injured herself and hid in a tip. Rachel had bled to death. She had also told her journalist friend about the ‘conspiracy’ and his killing was ordered by Peter Dodgy bastard!
It was a fine closing episode to the series. It was nice for the team to go somewhere else for a change, away from the drab streets of London. It’s another well written episode that everyone involved should take credit for. Here’s waiting for series 13, next year!
8/10
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2 comments:
Not well executed.
We'v got actors in Zambia why on earth did they use south african actors? The guy couldnt even speak Bemba, the Zambian local language they were supposedly using.
He didnt even make a serious effort to learn the language.
Just pathetic.
Agree with Akenos. This whole episode was jarring - the accents were all wrong, the places did not look real, the hospital was unbelievable, the settings were out of place. There's a bandit attack, and the team just carry on as if nothing has happened? If this was a real bandit attack in Zambia, the embassies would have got involved, the TV crews would have been there, the team would have been airlifted out, the police would have been all over the place, the army would most likely have intervened, the bandits would be tracked down. Africa is not really this incredibly lawless hell-hole, you know. Ordinary people do live there, there are cities and roads and houses and the internet and everything. People even wear suits and drive cars to work. This episode took the worst pre-conceptions of 50s Africa and made it look like today. It's a little insulting.
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