Prime Suspect
3, 1993 Review by Tracy Thomas
DCI Tennison (Helen Mirren) has been transferred to Vice. Her
assignment is to round up the young male prostitutes, or "rent
boys," and their clients, or "punters" in a flurry of morality.
But when one of the boys burns to death in the apartment of a
frightened transsexual, the same upstanding administrators who
sent her to make the streets safe try to keep her from investigating
the murder.
It doesn't stop her, of course, and tensions mount as her focus
shifts from the sleezy and often violent pimp (David Thewlis)
to the darling of the department, Edward Parker Jones, the head
of a center for troubled boys (Ciaran Hinds), and possibly a pedophile.
In the midst of this, an former lover in town on a lecture circuit
prompts Tennison to re-evaluate her life's decisions. At the conclusion,
loose ends lie strewn about. All choices are tainted with regret,
and yet, the element of truth in that messiness is, ultimately,
quite satifying.
Mirren captivates her audience again as Jane Tennison, this time
exploring the character even more thoroughly and fearlessly than
in the first two episodes. Here Tennison fights for every decision,
even those in her past. In a scene with her former lover at his
hotel, she shows us what she's given up for her job, not by explaining
it to him, not by breaking down in tears, but by glancing at his
hair as she stands behind him.
This is perhaps the most wrenching of the Prime Suspect series,
because it has children at its focus, abused in a world of drugs,
sex, and AIDS by unscrupulous adults, and because that focus intensifies
Tennison's own struggle over the choices she has made and the
one she faces when she finds herself pregnant.
See this review here
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