TV Review: SILK: Season 3, Episode 6 [BBC]

BBC’s Silk Season 3 Episode 6 TV Show Review. Silk: Season 3, Episode 6 is poignant, powerful, superbly acted and surprisingly unexpected in every way conclusion to the unique court-room drama Silk. The performances are exceptional, the writing is tense and hard-hitting and the levels of drama and depression reach get so high that they threaten to come out as a disappointment. There is one other asset of Episode 6 that prevented that and it was the beautifully made statement about the reality of lawyers’ life and of the courtroom routine. The story in Episode 6 is fully anchored to this meaning and tie together in a masterfully unexpected and very affecting conclusion.

The production values of the episode, as was the case with the rest of the season, were excellent. The cinematography was beautiful, the camera work-greatly efficient. Every time the episode cut to a close up emotion and suspense were added to the story. Towards the end there is also some truly spectacular use of focus-pulling and editing which built the suspense quite efficiently. It is rather difficult to choose a winner between the top three artists in this episode-Maxine Peake in the main role, Cilla Ware as the director or Peter Mofflat as the writer. For all their excellent work on the show, it is not the visuals that deserve the credit for the show’s effectiveness.

Maxine Peake is totally unhinged in her character here. We see her out of control, in full control and completely broken under emotional pressure; the episode offers us so much that we actually get a couple of moments when she is genuinely happy.  Undoubtedly her strongest moments are those of desperation and disappointment. It is a good bet that the writers left that for the end because it works so well dramatically. We’ve seen this character in constant stream of wins and now, at the most difficult case ever we see the danger, the fear, the shock, the hopelessness of the possibility of losing like never before. We see that character and the actress as never before-it is both deeply shocking and moving.

The direction is spectacularly good as well. We are held in a state of constant dramatic tension, regardless if it is the single backstory of a dying lawyer or the insanely difficult case of Martha. Here, for once, we don’t waste our time with the initial ten minutes. We jump straight into the court-room, the place where we all want to be while watching Silk. The director wonderfully makes our hearts race as the tides turn one after the other. Twists and turns are aplenty and the stakes go higher and higher until the final five to ten minutes when we are just left in a sequence of overwhelming emotive impact following the climax of the season and the episode. There is a truly powerful ever-rising emotion that is perfectly justified by the script in Episode 6 and it is governed superbly.

The writing is great too. It bears the notion of how misplaced the idea of truth is within the job of lawyers. It is the thing that both sides fear and by the end of the episode we never really understand or make up our own minds whether truth is the court-room is good or not. All we can think of is just how terrifying and responsibility-heavy being lawyer is and how strong those people are.

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