Ultraviolet – review (TV series)

Director: Joe Ahearne

First aired: 1998

Contains spoilers

The day before writing this review I received a comment on the blog from reader Ian who mentioned that I hadn’t reviewed the series yet. There are plenty of films in my collection that I haven’t yet gone back to and this UK mini-series was one of those. I’m always happy to receive review suggestions and dug the old DVD out, and once on couldn’t stop watching. Really, I remembered this being good, I’d forgotten just how good.

The series ran for 6 episodes and was composed of self contained stories with an over-riding arc. It also didn’t mention vampires, though vampires they are as we shall see when we look at lore, instead referring to them as leaches (as a derivative term) and code 5s. Why code 5? Roman numeral V… ahh…

The series follows Michael (Jack Davenport), a cop who is on the stag night of his colleague and best friend Jack (Stephen Moyer) when a snitch calls. By the time Mike has dropped Jack off and found the snitch he has been assassinated. Mike chases after the suspected shooter but looses him in the underground when he checks round the corner through a mirror. Unbeknown to him the assassin is stood there – vampires do not cast reflections. By the next day Jack has gone missing, leaving his fiancé Kirsty (Colette Brown) jilted at the altar.

The investigation of Jack’s disappearance is taken over by Vaughan Rice (Idris Elba) and Angie March (Susannah Harker) claiming to be from CIB but agents of the organisation set up to investigate and exterminate code 5s. With Jack turned, Mike gets drawn into the shadowy world and becomes the Agency’s newest recruit. What the series does really well is make you question who the good guys and the bad guys really are and this is seen mostly through Mike’s eyes.

All the main human character’s are flawed in one way or another and the backgrounds of the characters lend them to be... I would say dour but gritty would probably be a better term. Angie is a doctor whose husband and one of her twin daughters were turned, in order to draw her in. The Agency 'took care' of her daughter and husband – we’ll get to vampiric death soon.

Rice was a soldier in the (first) gulf war. He was the survivor of a squad attacked and turned by a vampire. We find out later he survived by running whilst his squad stood their ground and, by the time they got to him, the sun was rising. He had to deal with his squad and then was medically discharged from the army with PTSD.

Leader of the Agency is Pearse (Philip Quast), a priest (though he never wears paraphernalia) we do not hear much of his past, except a supposition that it was the vampires who drove him to the priesthood. He has his own, more contemporary to the series, demons to fight. There is a suggestion that the Agency is run by Vatican money but Pearce confirms it is funded by taxpayers money.

We see lots of Agency soldiers from time to time. We are not in the realm of stakes and crosses but grenades and guns loaded with carbon tipped dum dum bullets. The main non-Agency character is Kirsty whose obsession with discovering what happened to Jack and Mike, who essentially vanishes from the face of the Earth when he joins the Agency, suffices to place Mike and herself in peril.

The vampires do not have fangs. The jury is out on holy items – it depends on the faith of both the user and the vampire. I mentioned that they do not have reflections, nor do they show up on video (the guns are fitted with cameras to ensure the target is code 5) and their voices cannot be recorded or be carried on a phone signal (it 'makes surveillance a bitch'). They feed on blood and the bites heal rapidly leaving no humanly visible trace of attack. A complete drain turns but a taste leaves an infection, or taint, that can only be seen in UV light and makes the victim susceptible to suggestion.

The death of a vampire is explosive, to say the least, and leaves a powder behind. Once turned, however, a vampire cannot truly die. The ashes can be reformed (we find out how in the last episode) and so they are kept in secure storage – a prison of ashes if you like. Male vampires are sterile and female vampires do not menstruate, they only use sex as a method of seduction.

As well as the conspiracy angle these vampires are seductive. They claim they never force someone to cross over (as turning is termed) but they find out what the person wants the most and offer them that. One of their number claims that they created all religion and that they are the afterlife – he claims he crossed over to save his own soul. One question, as the series does actively challenge the viewer during its length, is whether the vampires are actually the enemy and whether what they are after is peace or the peace of a final solution.

Merging gritty police drama with supernatural elements, this worked really well. All the performances are excellent and the soundtrack enhances the viewing experience. There is a nice photography distinction between night and day, the filmmakers purposefully aiming for leafy suburbia for the majority of day shots and the seedy city underbelly for night shots, offering a visual distinction beyond light differences.

The effects were sparingly used as the budget seemed a little low for full-on Hollywood type effects, the series does not lack for this rather it concentrated on story and character. Some of the story lines touched on very controversial social issues and yet never sensationalised them, handling them with a combination of gritty realism and sensitivity.

The whole series closed off the main arc nicely but left enough open to pique the interest for a second series. That never came to pass and series creator Joe Ahearne claims he did all with the series that he wanted to. This took the genre out of the gothic and into the modern without seeming silly and built genuine tension into some of the episodes 8 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.