Sandy! Get the sassermaet clatch!

Well, after a slick, streamlined and genuinely exciting opening, series nine of Death In Shetland has plummeted into complex daftness over the following two episodes like a gormless sheep falling down Calder’s Geo due to over indulgence in magic mushrooms; or a camera drone damaged by too-close a Bonxie encounter.

First there’s the problem of eyebrows. Sculpted female eyebrows of the non-penciled variety are a comparatively new phenomenon, so the supposed archive footage of maths genius Annie in her 80s schooldays, sporting a set of carefully coiffed supercilia in a a very Noughties mode, rendered the background appearance of Amstrad PCW 256s and 512s somewhat redundant. Anyway, she went to Oxford, encountered dodgy Professor Quirell and  became a bullet-scarred spook, from that time MI5 were so strapped for agents they sent their analysts out to catch armed cigarette smugglers at the Barras in Glasgow.

Modernist eyebrow sculpture also appears on the head of problem child Lisa Friel, whose accent started out Scottish, veered towards Tunbridge Wells and eventually settled into a Dublin twang. She’s on the run in the Worst Motorhome in the Known World with its owner, the man known only as Camper Van Angus. He must have Dutch heritage. They’re in Nesting watching the Mysterious Marine Laboratory, where Dr Mohan is making pharmaceuticals from limpets. The most inept policeman ever recruited fails to catch Lisa when she goes shopping for Pot Noodles, leaving Angus to freeze in a deckchair – no shelter whatsoever – while scanning Dr Mohan’s lair with big binoculars, taking notes. In a notebook. He is, however, wearing a hat, though not a woolly one.

Later Lisa goes to sleep while Angus, still scanning, sees something suspicious, goes to investigate, breaks into the Marine Lab, hears female screaming and subsequently disappears, only to turn up on the steps of the Gilbert Bain Hospital in a catatonic state, doubtless injected with liquidised limpets. There is  a well known limpet addiction problem in Shetland, along with folk hopelessly hooked on spoots and whelks. But never fear, despite being out all night, Van Angus’s notebook, in which he has been taking notes has NOT BLOWN AWAY and soon Grumpy Ruth, the Cagney inspector, is inside the lab and asserting that two JCB excavators engaged in sexual congress are very much like the dinosaur peerie Noah thought he saw when his mother stopped to collect (now dead) Anton the Suspicious Frenchman, before becoming dead herself. Got all that? Phew!

A word about the junior acting in this. Jacob Ferguson, who plays Noah, is terrific in a Boys from Brazil cold-eyed psychotic way though the interplay between him and (apparently) child-averse Cagney is pushed to breaking point: we know she’s going to come over all maternal in the end. But that baby in the Gilbert Bain Hospital, the one belonging to…one of Tosh’s pals, probably… is the real star, bald as a coot and keeping its ( girl or boy, who knows?) eyes firmly on an out-of-shot mother, the set lighting or indeed anything except the actor supposed to be its parent. Best bit so far.

Meanwhile, let’s have some racial stereotyping of the clumsiest kind! It seems that Anton is an ace  card shark who plays in a regular high stakes poker night at JJ Wang’s Chinese Restaurant, where JJ’s assistant Nathan is or was having a gay fling with Anton the Frenchman. Also, the nasty one of John Harris’s two sons is heavily in debt because he thought he was at a 500 Night in the Hillswick Hall. Same poker night where Malcolm Dick, he of the shotgun face-off in episode one, lost cash and found out his brother was shagging Eleanor, his fiancée. And speaking of sexual cavortings, it turns out Ian, husband of the murdered Annie, couldn’t have killed her because he was having dirty dealings with her pal Joni, wife of Jamie, who knows that Annie was investigating freight shipments into Sumburgh. Because…just because.

We need more dead bodies, so first Jealous John Harris, who loved Annie (“but not like that”) decides to run down bad and faithless husband Ian, because he thinks he’s the murderer, even though he’s just been released due to the shagging-Joni alibi. As it turns out, John just gives Ian (played by an actor with an alarming resemblance to Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber) a very sore face, and then gets in an argument with the nasty one (Patrick) of his two sons, accidentally killing the nice son (Fergus) in the process. With an anchor.  These things happen at sea. It was a fluke (anchor joke, sorry).

What else? The follicular issues continue, many of which would be solved by the judicious application of headgear. Proper, woollen, Shetland-knitted headgear. The decorous use of scarves is insufficient. I mean, what is going on with Tosh-Lacey’s hair. There’s an ENORMOUS amount of it, and it comes, scene by scene, in a variety of Kirby-grip-stanchioned styles. Also, what’s with the gurning, Alison? That’s a camera, not the wee guy in the back row at the Citz. The Last Minister in Shetland – seen preaching to a quite large congregation of three at one point – is also having trouble with his massive and unruly barnet. GO TO JAMIESONS AND GET A BUNNET! Doesn’t anyone involved in this know you lose nine-tenths of your body heat through your head, and on this showing a large amount of brainpower.

Oh, wait minute, there are the Jacobsens, Karin and Stefan, Swedish global finance experts who’re on the MI5 list of nasties because, as Prof Quirrell says, “intelligence agencies are xenophobic by nature.” Which doesn’t strike me as particular intelligent, but then he’s a mathematician. And they know nothing (I can talk, having got 16 per cent in my arithmetic O-level prelim). Stefan and Karin have a sick daughter who’s come to Shetland for limpet therapy.

Actually, it’s not all bad. Ashley Jensen as Cagney looks and sounds royally pissed off to be where she is and not back in London listening to her Teenage Fanclub records. But her bad tempered charm and withering aggression are always fun to watch (“Never come to my house again!”) Sandy, though. If there’s one thing that annoys folk in Shetland about the show it’s that the only real  Shetlander in the cast, and a very good actor indeed in other settings, is portrayed as a hapless dogsbody. “Sandy, get me everything you can about the trade in reestit puffins! Sandy, check out the files on orca smuggling! Sandy, where the hell is Norway from here? Get me Sassermaet now! And what’s the difference between a yow and a yoal?

Meanwhile, I’m off for some cream of limpet soup and a pint of illegal soy sauce. There’s a poker game at Golden Dragon tonight! I know I can win. It’s just a case of doing the maths…