When CBS released ‘CSI’ in the fall of 2000, it was inadvertently born a subgenre of police drama which focused on forensic evidence rather than deductions and leads. Like all subgenres, this one has had its peak and its moment of going unnoticed but that does not imply that it has been lost, as ‘Traces’ shows, a series whose first season of six episodes reaches Filmin.
And it is that, at least in appearance, this British policeman (original series of the Alibi pay channel, owned by UKTV) puts three forensic scientists from SIFA at the center, a team that incorporates the young student Emma (Molly Windsor, whom we have seen in ‘La infamia’) who, doing a practice on a fictitious case, discovers too many similarities with the death of her mother.
‘Traces’ is written by Amelia Bullmore, who takes the book ‘Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime’ by Val McDermid as a guide to raise the investigations that arise in the series, because not only Emma is in search of answers but there have been a terrible fire in a nightclub that could have been intentional.
A solvent policeman more than secrets and lies
However, the series is deceiving. By very aspect of crime drama, with the scientists in the laboratory analyzing clues, the script of Bullmore soon turns to a thriller of secrets and lies in which everyone seems to hide something and have to do with the death of the protagonist’s mother.
This does not mean that we do not have the occasional scene in which they examine evidence and perform simulations to see what could have happened in the fire with which the series begins. There are and, I admit, It has caused me a certain nostalgia for the two thousand (for some reason I have remembered ‘Bones’ a lot).
No matter how consolidated the topic of forensic science is on television, what could have distinguished ‘Traces’ most remains in the background, being swallowed by some kind of Scottish noir. This identity struggle makes her one of the many policemen that populate the platforms of streaming.
A struggle to find your identity
This same circumstance that the series doesn’t seem to know exactly what kind of series it is He forces his own verisimilitude a bit, prompting uncomfortable questions about the characters’ circumstances. Everything that surrounds the character of Molly Windsor, from her own design or her family background, does not seem realistic.
Fortunately, the talent in front of the cameras (Windsor herself along with Martin Compston, Laura Fraser and Jennifer Spence among others) hides some of the flaws of the series and makes the walk through its six episodes quite bearable.
In short, ‘Traces’ He is a two-faced policeman who fails to balance his subgenres. A thriller of secrets and lies that works best when the series embraces the noir more than the whodunnit forensic. A fiction made with a broad brush but whose punctual interesting brush strokes presage something better than what has been seen.