Vigil, episode 1 recap: is Suranne Jones’s murder case already sunk?

A civilian woman cop on an active-service nuclear sub? Would the Navy allow that?

Frankly, who cares? Vigil has an absolute gem of a premise and a wholly unfamiliar, hugely claustrophobic, utterly thrilling setting for what turned out to be an ingenious new take on that old crime-drama chestnut, the locked-room murder mystery. Except, in this case, it’s the detective who was locked in, and being a woman in what’s still a mostly male environment made it a lot more interesting.

Even so, these issues were dealt with convincingly within the narrative of Vigil – some arcane legislation meant that, because the sub was in British waters at the time, the police had to lead the investigation; thus, the Navy were (very) begrudgingly forced to allow the cop on board. And, given that it’s the third decade of the 21st century, why not a woman? Women have been serving in the Submarine Service since 2011.

Full marks for plunging us straight into the action

A trawler being pulled – terrifyingly – under the waves made for a properly edge-of seat opening. But did anyone actually figure out what was going on? Those who put two and two together recalling news stories about how submarines and fishing nets rarely go well together will have decided that the submarine, HMS Vigil, was responsible, and this was what was making its captain and crew so antsy. In which, they’ll have been as surprised as anyone by the gut-wrenching twist at the end of the episode…

Hang on, before we go to the end… who died, and why would anyone want to kill them?

Chief Petty Officer Burke (Martin Compston), a mouthy engineer thrown off the bridge for questioning the captain’s decision not to go to the trawlermen’s rescue. His death was supposedly from a heroin overdose – despite the fact that he wasn’t a known drug user and he had passed a mandatory drugs test recently. When DCI Amy Silva (Suranne Jones) discovered bruising on his neck and no evidence in his nasal passage that that had actually snorted the drug, she immediately suspected the heroin was a decoy, an attempt to cover up murder.

What do we know about the detective DCI Amy Silva?

Glasgow CID’S best detective, according to her boss – and she looked every bit of it. Suranne Jones is made for a role like this: sensitive, on-edge, intelligent, vulnerable but tough with it. We know from her examination of the body that she did “two years in medical school – it wasn’t for me”. But why? And that wasn’t the only question she left worryingly unanswered, such as “How are you with confined spaces?” before she boarded the sub. As for her anxiety pills, best not to ask. Her relationship with her sidekick, DC Kirsten Longacre, was curiosity-arousing though.

What’s going on between Silva and Longacre?

The hugging and apology at the airport, the flashbacks to domestic bliss, the drunken Morse messaging on each other’s forearms – and the boss’s sharp intake of breath at Silva requesting Longacre as her backup. Clearly there’s a history, and a degree of intimacy. But so far, it’s impossible to say how far it goes. And there are hints of an absent man and child in Silva’s background. But for now the key thing is that Longacre provides the drama with a whole other storyline – her parallel on-land investigation into Burke, which not only opens out the story but ratchets up the tension by letting Longacre discover things that Silva can’t possibly know, but that put her in danger. It’s really very clever.

So why would anyone want to kill Burke?

That’s the big fishy question, isn’t it? By close of episode, Silva – despite the crew being largely uncooperative – had uncovered some blood residue and Longacre had established a link to a trawler’s disappearance; and also that Burke had links to members of a peace camp set up on the outskirts of the naval base. She also found a flash drive cunningly concealed in his room, on which he’d recorded video blog about how to kill the crew of Vigil, to be watched in the event of his own death. But she was interrupted while looking at it… by Navy security. So Silva knows nothing about any of that, except about the sinking of the trawler, which she decided to confront the captain about.

Does that mean Silva’s in peril?

Well, with a murderer on almost certainly on board and a string sense of conspiracy swirling about, we’re certainly being encouraged to think so. Although, to be honest, by episode’s end Silva had other more immediate concerns on her mind. For one thing Captain Newsome (Paterson Joseph) revealed to her that it wasn’t Vigil that had sunk the trawler but an enemy sub they suspected had been secretly shadowing Vigil – something that shouldn’t have been technically possible and which was “the single most frightening development in submarine warfare in [his] lifetime.”

That sounds a bit worrying

Too right. Especially when he added that it was delusional to think we weren’t always at war. Then, to make matters worse, lights started flashing and sirens going off and tannoys screaming “Action stations!” as the entire sub seemed to go into complete meltdown, with people and equipment crashing over and Vigil in a death dive and engineers pulling their hair out and shouting about “a complete reactor shutdown.”

Gulp! So what happened?

Presumably we’ll find out in Monday’s second episode. You’ve got to think it probably wasn’t terminal – it would be a shame to get rid of the submarine, the star and all the evidence with five whole episodes still to go. But it was a fabulously nerve-shredding note to break off on, all but guaranteeing viewers will be back for the next leg of what promises to be a fantastically entertaining voyage.

“Mind your ‘ead” – some notes on life deep beneath the ocean waves

The submarine’s coxswain, Glover (played by Endeavour’s Shaun Evans), was both Silva’s guide and ours to the rules of life aboard HMS Vigil, usually delivered with admirable pith:

• “A submarine’s not a ship, always a boat.” Something to keep in mind next time you meet a “sardine”.

• “It’s an automatic disciplinary if I step into the ladies’ bunks,” said Glover, bouncing back from the curtain like he’d hit an invisible wall. If only it was thus in Civvy Street.

• “The body is in the bomb shop.” A torpedo tube is the optimal place to keep a dead body on board a sub, as the kitchen freezer is too full of food.