This time the body that Eve Lockhart and her forensic elves are farming for information is that of an occasionally criminal Irish man, Conor, found floating in the sea. Hale, whose bout of being interesting last week turns out to be an anomaly, quickly pegs it as a case of ‘collecting the post’ gone wrong – apparently drug-dealers drop the drugs off-shore and then they are collected by divers.

The only problem is that Conor – who comes complete with a hard-scrabble, alcoholic, domestic violence threatening Irish family – doesn’t have any water in his lungs. He didn’t drown, but he is dead.

Drugs. Diving. Deception.

Patsy Fay, Conor’s tough, fast-moving, fast-talking sister, is missing at sea along with their client. Her husband, a gormless alcoholic, is left to try and hold the remnants of the family together. His son is a precocious poppet of the urchin variety, who appears to have a slightly iffy idea of what selkie’s are. Lacking a social, reliable father figure, he cloms onto Oggy and Mike.

You might not remember who Mike is. He has no particularly interesting moments and his skill set seems to involve wandering around holding instruments and screwing his face up. He has a past history with Eva though, so there are a lot of serious looks accompanied by yearning strings. To date his most identifiable character trait is that he doesn’t like actually putting his forensic science into practice.

Possibly a bit of a problem for a forensic scientist. Maybe he should have spent more time thinking out his career.

Oggy on the other hand, actually has a faintly interesting element. Then bond over mythology and paranormal – which Oggy believes in. This may or may not be a result of him not being on his meds. It is hard to tell since we have yet to get a good anchor point for what the character is like medicated and not-medicated. Or what his medication is actually designed to treat.

To date, he seems a little out-of-touch emotionally and perhaps a bit odd – but not clinically so. Lots of people believe in the paranormal and talk to inanimate objects around their office. Admittedly, in his case the objects are the dead but still…

The final denouement turned out to be rather ham-handed, environmental awareness shoe-horned in along with a misty-edged flashback of offensive Irish stereotyping. (Honestly, it was less prolonged than the Sons of Anarchy cod-Irish clod-hopping, but more intense. Hard to pick which is worse.)

Good points…

…Hmm. Well, Rosa didn’t over-empathize with anyone this week. Probably because she didn’t have much to do other than talk about kelp forests and squint at Oggy. They are probably going to have ‘Sexual Tension’, mostly because neither has any other appropriate romantic partners.

Lockhart spent a lot of her time looking pinched and unhappy about things, but she does have very shiny hair and wear a practical waxed jacket so that’s nice.

I do rather want a Silent Witness/Body Farm cross-over now, fighting over possession of a body and asserting the primacy of THEIR state-of-the-art forensic establishment.

After a brief lift last week delivered by Keith Allen’s enthusiastically impish Hale, Body Farm lagged again this week. The plot remained leaden, at best, although I suppose the cracks were papered over better. This is not a winning formula for me.