A girl boss detective returns to her hometown, only to find herself in the middle of a murder mystery that only brings up the own haunting traumas from the past. RTE’s latest attempt at making a thriller, Blackshore does just enough to not lose your interest in it. It’s hard not to frown at some of the tropey elements, but the straightforward plot and convincing storytelling make for a good binge-watching session.
Spoilers Ahead
Why’s Fia Back In Blackwater?
Fia Lucey, a Dublin cop, is sent to her hometown as a punishment for violently intervening in a sexual assault incident at a Dublin bar. It’s been twenty years since her father killed everyone in the family except her in a murder-suicide. The chatter amongst town folks starts again upon Fia’s return. To add to that, the disappearance of her babysitter Chloe the night before only adds to Fia’s already heavy conscience. She’s not liked in this small town, and her return from Dublin opens a can of worms.
What Happened To Roisin Hurley?
Fia’s first case upon returning is about Roisin, a local hotel owner who’s been missing. Fia remembers Roisin as a kind person, and finding out her whereabouts is not something she wants to take lightly. Roisin has a history of drinking, depression, and suicide attempts, and the guards only believe that this is one of her whimsical absences. Things change when Roisin’s corpse is found in the lake. A blunt hit on her head before she died proves that someone put her to sleep long before she was found in the water.
Why Does Fia Suspect Cian?
Cian Furlong, Fia’s partner in the case, is the first person she begins to suspect for the murder of Roisin. The CCTV footage from the hotel shows Roisin shoving Cian away before walking out of the hotel. Fia and Cian already didn’t start off on good terms, and the footage only creates room for suspicion. Fia finds blood spots in Cian’s boat, and the samples match Roisin’s. The tension between Cian and Fia keeps increasing to the point where they stop working together. Cian loses his calm when he sees Fia questioning his wife, Niamh, inside his own house. Fia is almost convinced that Cian is the murderer, but it turns out that Cian has multiple alibis and only had an affair with Roisin. He’s as determined as Fia to find out who the killer is, and the duo agrees to work together.
Who’s The Girl In The Caravan?
During the investigation, Donna, a receptionist at the hotel, tells Fia that Roisin was seen arguing with a girl on the night of her disappearance. We see the girl with a man inside a caravan. The girl demands to know where Roisin is before getting the news of her death. From closer observation of the CCTV footage, Cian figures out that the girl uses an inhaler that can only be bought with a prescription. The search for the girl continues with the hope that it will lead to some substantial motive behind Roisin’s murder. Fia decides to look through Roisin’s room once again, and voila! Fia finds a photo frame with Roisin’s daughter’s name, Carrie, written on it. It turns out Roisin has secretly had a daughter all these years. Carrie is devastated by the news of her mother’s death and is wary about going to the police about it. Roisin only trusted Liam, the man she left Carrie with, and Carrie is hellbent on not leaving his side.
Is Sean McGuire Guilty?
Forensics found ketamine, the textbook “rape drug,” in Roisin’s system. Sean, the nephew of the business tycoon of the town, Bill McGuire, is brought in for interrogation. Sean had a history of dealing ketamine. He and Roisin also had a dating history in the past. At the same time, a girl named Lynette comes up to Fia, suspecting Sean might have raped her. Fia and Cian start looking for more evidence to pin Sean down for drugging and raping women. They find employment records at the hotel, where many young women were fired after only a few months of joining. Suspicions around Sean begin to make more and more sense . But Fia and Cian hit a roadblock when Lynette refuses to testify against him. Lynette is traumatized by the incident, and the ketamine high has left her memories in a mess. Sean is released soon after, only to come back and confess that he didn’t sell the ketamine to Roisin but to Charlie.
How’s Charlie Connected To Roisin’s Death?
Charlie Reid is a local restaurant owner with close ties to the McGuire family. Roisin and him were supposedly best friends. It turns out that Charlie had an addiction to teenage girls, and spiking their drinks and raping them was his thing. It becomes obvious when Fia eventually manages to find Carrie. Carrie panics and goes to kill Charlie the first thing after she flees. Charlie captures Carrie and drives away from his house. When Carrie managed to get away from Charlie, he had no option but to seek refuge from Bill McGuire. Bill is not a person who’d risk his own reputation in the town for an outsider, even if he called the person “practically family.” Charlie gets desperate and lost; not knowing what to do, he shoots himself right in front of Fia’s face. Before shooting himself, he tells Fia that he didn’t kill Roisin. It’s only after his death that his list of crimes come to surface. The search and rescue team retrieves a car from the lake while looking for Carrie. The car belonged to Charlie, and inside of it was the dead body of Chloe Whelan, Fia’s missing babysitter from 20 years ago. If that’s not enough, Cian finds Carrie in a warehouse, and she recollects being raped by Charlie on the night of Roisin’s disappearance. Roisin walked in on Charlie raping her unconscious daughter moments before she disappeared.
Who Killed Chloe Whelan?
Charlie dies, the case is solved, and people of Blackwater flock at the grand whiskey festival hosted by Bill McGuire. Fia is not okay with all the convenient conclusions around her. The fact that Charlie said he didn’t kill Roisin had Fia worried. She comes across one of the jewelry pieces that was recovered along with Chloe’s body. When she goes to the Whelans to ask about it, they show him more jewelry from Chloe’s room. Fia figures that it’d be impossible for Charlie, a young chef and a miscreant at the time, to afford to gift Chloe jewelry laced with diamonds. Also, the fact that Charlie couldn’t swim makes it impossible for him to swim out of the lake after drowning in the car.
While listing the evidence, Cian recognizes one of the victims of Charlie’s crimes in a photograph—his own wife, Niamh. The night Chloe Whelan went missing, Niamh was the girl Charlie took, not Chloe. Niamh’s recollection of the night was just that she and Charlie started kissing. But when she woke up, she found a certain someone trying to wake Charlie up, calling him “sunshine.” Mr. Bill McGuire is known to greet people by that name . After working for the McGuire family for most of her life, Niamh knew for a fact that the voice was Bill McGuire’s.
The final piece of the puzzle was to link the murder of Chloe to Bill. While Niamh and Cian kept Bill busy at the whiskey festival, Fia sneaked into Bill’s house to take a look at his accounts. Charlie got his own restaurant, and Roisin got half the share of the hotel just a few days after Chloe’s disappearance and the Lucy family massacre. It wasn’t Charlie who killed Chloe; it was the town’s guardian angel, Bill McGuire. It’s clear that Charlie and Roisin got what they wanted in exchange for wiping Chloe off of this planet.
Who Killed Roisin?
Fia keeps having a recurring dream from her childhood: her father hanging his wet clothes in the barn where the family died. Taking a trip to the lake with Fergus, Jack’s old friend, Fia finds a spot that belonged to her father. The best spot for trout fishing, Fergus suggests. Fergus also mentions seeing Jack in that spot just the day before his death. That spot isn’t far from the place where Charlie’s car was found. Fia seeks help from the coroner, whose dad had the job at the time of the Lucy family tragedy. Fia finds out that the coroner had reasonable doubts about Jack’s death, and the pictures from the crime scene had one big inconsistency. Fia dreams of her father hanging the clothes every day—wet clothes. In the pictures of the crime scene, the shirts and the water stains on the ground have been removed.
Fia’s uncle, Donal, always stressed the fact that he had resigned from his cop duties after his brother died. An absolute green flag, I should say, up until this point, he was the one who gave orders to stop the investigation before quitting. Fia confronts him, and he breaks pretty easily. Donal accepts that his daughter’s treatment wouldn’t be possible if he didn’t take the money from Bill. Bill had Donal in his pocket, just like most of the other people in the town. Jack saved Bill McGuire when the car drowned, hence the wet clothes. Bill sent Roisin and Charlie to rough him up in order to keep his mouth shut, but everything that could possibly go wrong, went wrong. Jack’s wife and son walked in when he was getting beaten up, and in a moment of panic, Roisin shot all of them. Donal was asked to clean up the mess and make it look like a murder-suicide, and he chose his daughter over his brother and his family.
Fia decides to go back to Dublin after this. Her whole life, she’d been lied to by the only person who was the closest to a dad. Before leaving for Dublin, Fia meets Fergus again. Fergus is delighted to tell her that Lady Elizabeth, Jack’s boat still works just fine. Fia hadn’t taken the boat out, and she knew the only person other than her who could. She collects blood samples from the boat, and the blood turns out to be Roisin’s. It turns out that after the night she saw Charlie raping her daughter, Roisin went straight to Donal. Roisin wanted to expose Bill and Charlie and all their crimes, along with the one Donal did. When his perfectly fine life faces a jeopardy, Donal in a moment of rage, bangs Roisin’s head with a shovel. Donal took Lady Elizabeth out, dumped Roisin’s body on the lake, and sit back while Fia almost lost her life trying to find out the killer.
Roisin wasn’t an ideal person. She fed Charlie with young girls until it was her own daughter she found in his bed. She killed Jack and his family in a moment of madness. But when she had the chance to come clean, it was taken from her. Fia, despite her aunt’s and cousin’s cuckoo justifications, arrests Donal for the murder of Roisin.
What To Expect From Season 2?
In Blackshore‘s ending sequence, Bill McGuire still can’t be punished for his crimes. It’s obvious that the town’s most beloved employer wasn’t going to go down so easily, considering other people take the fall for his deeds. Bill is a person who’d keep people in debt to make them dance to his will, and nobody knows that better than Cian and Niamh. The ending of Blackshore leaves a few ends loose for a possible season 2. It’s still to be seen if Fia can get to Bill and where Cian’s career goes after this. Fia and Cian started off in a very Rust and Martin-esque manner, but it’s good to see that now we’ve moved on from that template in detective shows. As Cian says, “time has a habit of bringing things to the surface,” we can expect that the second season will shed some light on Bill and his crimes.
