Passenger, on BritBox

Everyone in Chadder Vale knows Jim Bracknell remains traumatized by a vicious physical assault, but extremist environmental demonstrators still form a daily mob outside his fracking facility, obviously hoping to intimidate the emotionally-damaged man. That is so like them, isn’t it? Former Met cop Riya Ajunwa claims to be his friend, but she never arrests his tormentors, presumably because there are so many. However, when his assailant gets an early release, Ajunwa immediately gets in his face. The surprise homecoming stirs up big trouble in creator-writer Andrew Buchan’s six-episode Passenger, which premieres today on BritBox.

People seem to end up in Chadder Vale. Ajunwa relocated with her husband, but stayed to look after her now ex’s slightly addled mother. Yet, you just cannot take the big city instincts out of the copper. Indeed, Ajunwa rightly suspects the recent rash of strange happenings in the woods must mean something. However, her boss, Chief Constable Linda Markel, only cares about stolen trash “bins” (as they annoyingly call them in the UK). It sounds trivial to Ajunwa, but the thing is, there really have been quite a few stolen.

Presumably, the missing persons are somehow related to the unseen thing that apparently escaped into the woods during the prologue. At least Katie Wells did not stay missing long. She reappeared a day later, just in time to enjoy her disgraced father’s release from prison. She would be worried about Eddie Wells potentially threatening her Turkish boyfriend, but Mehmet Shah turns up dead, having fallen from the roof of Bracknell’s plant—suspiciously if you ask Ajunwa, but not so, according to Markel. It turns out there might be some answers on the darkweb, they really just lead to more questions.

If the dark web had been around during the time of Twin Peak’s first season, Laura Palmer’s profile would have been all over it. That is clearly the vibe Buchan was going for, but he spends much more time and energy setting up a prospective second season than delivering any degree of payoff in the here and now. While Passenger liberally borrows elements from many shows that came before it, Buchan’s six episodes ultimately amount to less than meets the eye. It almost feels like the product of a small-town mystery Mad Libs.

That cobbled-together-feeling narrative is a shame, because the ensemble cast is quite strong. Wunmi Mosaku convincingly portrays Ajunwa as both a sympathetically neurotic mess and a forceful cop not to be trifled with. She also has terrific chemistry with Hubert Hanowicz playing her schlubby almost-but-not-quite-boyfriend, Jakub Makowski, an immigrant Polish mechanic.

David Threlfall is devastating as the deeply scarred Bracknell and Barry Sloane broods harder than a coffin nail as his pariah assailant. However, Arian Nik and Ella Bruccoleri hit all the wrong, shticky notes as Ajunwa’s trainee officers, Nish Chowdry and Allsion Day.

Directors Nicole Charles and Lee Haven Jones maintain a good deal of tension, but ultimately Passenger is too coy for its own good. There is a good deal of reassuring police procedural business and Ajunwa’s disdain for authority is certainly healthy, but the sixth episode leaves viewers wanting more, in the wrong way. There are worse options, but there are also considerably better streaming alternatives when Passenger launches today (10/17) on BritBox.