DVDFile

BBC / 683 Minutes / 2007 / Unrated / Street Date: January 17, 2012

At the forefront of Waking the Dead's intrigue is its very presentation. Eschewing the American default week-by-week airing, the episodes on this Waking the Dead: The Complete Season Six TV-on-DVD box set were broadcast as two-part movie events, with a pair of episodes airing during two consecutive nights. This primetime proximity theoretically allows for a Law & Order type of establishment, with the opening half setting up the mystery at hand and the second half shaking everything down.

Our team at the center of the show is led by one Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve), whose collection of crackerjack forensic experts have one specific duty: Taking on cold cases to try to not only breathe fresh air into them, but finally - after often many decades - getting their man. Trevor's partner Di (Wil Johnson), a psychological profiler named Grace (Sue Johnston), and a new forensic pathologist (Tara Fitzgerald) all join forces with Trevor on this season in an attempt to close the book on mysteries that have long gone undeciphered.

The adventures at hand on this Sixth Season takes our gaggle of detective whizzes to cases involving lost Sudanese skulls from the 19th century (the two parts of Deus Ex Machina), a kinky 1992 case in which a single bullet killed a lady and a gentleman while they were... you know... when they shouldn't have been (The Fall), and even a mid-1960s mystery involving a terribly decomposed body in a pleasant village garden and a psychiatric hospital escapee (Double Bind). Aiming both high and low, Waking the Dead knows a good crime drama setup when it sees one.

But consistency is not this TV-on-DVD edition's grandest virtue. We get long segments that work like gangbusters, but the series reverts to cheesy, CSI-lite exposition more often than it should. Crime dramas as a form of television are given a pass in this department much of the time, but great mysteries of the genre can usually withstand a couple obvious sequences within their narratives. In Waking the Dead, we get some excellent head-scratchers, but over the course of each double-episode, you'll be completely pulled out of the action at least a handful of times, and that's a big no-no for any crime drama worth its weight in boob tube gold.