Drama
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a little like its titular character. It’s painful. It gets under your skin. And it just might leave a mark.
Detective Chief Inspector Amy Silva is no stranger to tough cases. Investigating crimes committed in the British military, however, goes beyond tough.
In Season One of the BBC’s Vigil, Amy was tasked with navigating a murder onboard a Scottish submarine, as well as dealing with her tense relationship with her partner, DC Kirsten Longacre. What started as a straightforward case quickly became anything but; as Amy and Kirsten delved deeper and deeper (pun intended) into the murder, they also delved into an international conspiracy. That crisis may have been solved, and Amy and Kirsten’s dispute may have been put behind them. But of course, in the world of police drama, nothing ever stays solved.
Season Two of Vigil again puts Amy and Kirsten against another military mishap, this time in the British Air Force. When a routine weapons demonstration ends in seven casualties, the partners are called in to investigate what seems to be a terrorist attack — one aided by informants inside the Air Force itself.
They’re not underwater this time. But turns out that going above ground, much to our two detectives’ chagrin, doesn’t make things any less complicated.
In a television landscape often dominated by crime dramas, Vigil stands apart for one major reason: it doesn’t depend on gratuity to hook its audience.
That isn’t to say we’re out of the woods here. The show still sports plenty of issues. violence typical of the genre rears its head as people are shot and killed, blood flies, and a few grisly closeups of bullet wounds are shown. Language, though not overly frequent, is also present. All this content is far more extreme than you’d find in network procedurals such as NCIS and Law & Order. But for a streaming, TV-MA show, Vigil is restrained compared to many of its counterparts (think True Detective, for instance).
There is another major drawback to consider here, however, and it starts with our two main detectives.
Amy and Kirsten were romantically linked before the start of the series, and they slowly rekindle their feelings throughout the first season. By Season Two, they’re once again in a committed relationship (Kirsten is even pregnant, and she claims Amy’s teenage daughter as her own). They make sure to keep things professional—most of the time, you’d hardly know they were together—but every once in a while, the viewer is reminded of their relationship through dialogue or a brief romantic gesture. It’s an issue that constantly looms over the narrative, and that keeps Vigil from truly standing apart in the world of TV.
Vigil certainly poses some interesting questions about war and the role of the military, and it does so without fully embracing gratuity at every turn. But it also poses another question, one that’s up to the viewer to answer before reaching for the remote: does “less bad” really equate to “good”?
After a weapons test involving remotely piloted drones ends in seven military fatalities, DCI Amy Silva and DS Kirsten Longacre are called in to investigate.
The opening sequence showing the disastrous weapons demonstration provides a bloody and jarring start to the season. One of the drones begins firing on the British soldiers; we see spurts of blood and a brief, gruesome image of a young man being shot in the head. The drones then turn on the onlookers, causing an explosion that results in a few bloody wounds. The man tasked with piloting the drones is beaten by his fellow soldiers, who believe him to be responsible. Violence is absent from the rest of the episode until the very end, when a dead body is shown with a graphic bullet wound in his face.
Amy and Kirsten are in a romantic relationship, though we never see any intimacy between them. Other than Amy once referring to Kirsten as her girlfriend, they remain strictly professional as they work together on the case. A drone engineer tells a military officer to “shove your questions right up there,” to which the officer dryly responds, “Where exactly do you want me to shove my questions?”
The f-word is used four times throughout the episode, and the s-word is used five. “P-ss” is heard twice, the Lord’s name is misused twice, and “b—-rd,” “a–“ and “d–k” are each used once.
After their main suspect turns out to be a dead end, Amy travels to the (fictional) Middle Eastern country of Wudyan to pursue a new lead, while Kirsten investigates things at home with her new MI5 partner.
Rather than explicit violence, threatening situations prevail in this episode. Amy, Kirsten and a teenage girl they’re protecting are held at gunpoint, and Kirsten, several months pregnant, is threatened by a man with a knife. Amy attacks a shooter from behind and gives him a minor bleeding head wound. A girl abruptly stabs a soldier in the arm; we briefly see the wound before she’s restrained and taken away.
Amy’s teenage daughter, Poppy, expresses concern over her mother going to Wudyan because “they put gay people in prison.” Amy reassures her that she won’t be “kissing women” during her time there, then tells Kirsten that Poppy thinks she’ll be arrested for attending a “wild lesbian orgy.” The couple cuddles on the couch, and Amy kisses Kirsten’s cheek.
Amy drinks a can of beer with a British soldier.
The s-word is used three times, while “p-ss,” “h—” and the British curse “b–locks” are each heard once. God’s name is taken in vain once.
Lauren Cook is serving as a 2021 summer intern for the Parenting and Youth department at Focus on the Family. She is studying film and screenwriting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. You can get her talking for hours about anything from Star Wars to her family to how Inception was the best movie of the 2010s. But more than anything, she’s passionate about showing how every form of art in some way reflects the Gospel. Coffee is a close second.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a little like its titular character. It’s painful. It gets under your skin. And it just might leave a mark.
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