We first encountered DCI Amy Silva five years ago, trapped on a submarine with a killer (or killers). Next, she headed to the Persian Gulf to uncover a drone warfare-based plot, while work/life partner DS Kirsten Longacre managed things back at home.
But creator Tom Edge isn’t done with pushing his whodunnit thriller into exciting new arenas. Now, as series three looms, we can expect “thrills and spills”, he promises, as Suranne Jones’s Silva and Rosie Leslie’s Longacre head to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard to investigate a murder. “In series one, we dealt with this technology dismissed as a relic,” Edge tells . “In series two we were trying to look into the near future. So in series three, we wanted to look a little further around the corner. One of the areas that seemed interesting was the frozen north, in the context of shifting geopolitics and struggles over resource access.
“Svalbard is Norwegian in terms of sovereignty, but it operates under a treaty that allows people of any nation to live and work there. Because of this, it’s become a potential flashpoint for confrontation.”
And so Jones, Leslie, the rest of the cast and the production team decamped to the Arctic Circle in September last year. And while the crew had no crazed killers hiding in snowdrifts to contend with, there was still one implacable foe – the weather. As Edge tells it, throughout filming in Svalbard, the show was battling the elements.
“It was a challenging shoot,” he says. “Once the temperature drops, the batteries in modern film cameras start to fail. Even some more sedate scenes were really hard won by the crew. Some might say it was easier to blow something up than film a conversation in the snow.”
Edge has thrown Amy and Kirsten into this extreme setting. In the two previous series, the romantic partners have been at odds, then closer together emotionally while geographically further apart, but in this series their dynamic is upended when Kirsten is chosen to lead their investigation, swapping their usual roles.
The frozen north is a potential flashpoint for confrontation
“Kirsten wants to prove that she is every bit Amy’s equal, if not in rank, then in capability,” Edge says. “We use that to explore things in their relationship that have gone unspoken or untested.”
In other words, it sounds like the frosty setting and battery-freezing temperatures may be matched by the atmosphere between our central couple. And we can’t even look forward to any polar bears breaking up the tension (or raising the body count).
“We didn’t do polar bears, which was a shame,” Edge says. “Svalbard has one of the highest numbers of polar bears, but they are notoriously uncooperative. So no polar bears were used, or indeed harmed, during production.”
The same cannot be said, of course, for Svalbard’s residents – or meddling detectives…
The story so far...
DCI Amy Silva was sent to investigate a death on board the nuclear-powered submarine HMS . By the end of the series she had solved the case and restarted her relationship with her DS and former lover Kirsten Longacre. The duo formed a family along with Poppy, Amy’s adopted daughter from a previous relationship.
After a compromised drone kills soldiers and delegates from the fictional Kingdom of Wudyan during a joint demonstration in Scotland, Amy travels to an air base in the Persian Gulf to investigate, leaving a pregnant Kirsten behind. Although far apart, the pair work together to bring the guilty parties to justice, before celebrating the impending birth of a baby boy.