Some fans watching ITV’s Dark Heart on Wednesday (November 7) questioned whether they were even seeing the same show they’d started last week — and they actually had a point!
The gritty and grim thriller series is an adaptation of novelist Adam Creed’s Will Wagstaffe book series, about the titular detective haunted by the unsolved double murder of his parents decades earlier.
Wednesday’s episode hinged on Wagstaffe (Tom Riley) investigated the death of a young nurse on the London Underground — which was deemed mysterious because CCTV made it look as if she was being chased by an invisible assailant.
That’s a cool plot and all, but fans were a bit confused by Wagstaffe suddenly having an all-new investigatory team from last week, now headed up by A Touch of Frost‘s Jason Maza and The Bill‘s Michele Austin. And there were plenty of other little differences too, like Will’s nephew growing a few inches in a week:
There was similar confusion last week when some fans swore they’d actually seen Dark Heart before — and they were right! It’s all a bit of a muddled turn of events, but we’ll explain.
Dark Heart originally aired as a two-hour pilot on ITV Encore, but the channel soon closed. Proper ITV later agreed to turn Dark Heart into a full series by using its two-hour movie as a two-part pilot, and then shoot four more new episodes moving the story forward in time.
What viewers watched on ITV was the first newly-shot episode of Dark Heart. When Digital Spy chatted with star Tom Riley prior to the show’s relaunch last week, he revealed that one key aspect of the pilot that was ditched was DC Josie Chancellor’s (Anjli Mohindra) infatuation for Will.
“That was really interesting for us because as we watched it, that wasn’t very interesting to us to have a female sidekick defined by her relationship to her boss and how she’s in awe and love with him,” Riley explained.
“It felt like it was reductive to her and reductive to the show. So we talked about the idea that as this series progresses for Josie she begins by sort of holding him in such high regard and I think it’s more of a crush on his ability than him as a person.”
Dark Heart continues on Thursday at 9pm on ITV.
Source: Read Full Article