The Dark TV series arrives as a six-part Highlands murder investigation with Laura Donnelly at the center as DI Monica Kennedy. reviewed it as a cold, creepy crime drama, and the appeal is immediate: one death opens into a second case she has already handled. That earlier disappearance gives the series its drag and its shape.
Laura Donnelly and Mark Rowley
Laura Donnelly plays the investigator who is called to Jason Morgan’s body, while Mark Rowley appears in the story as Crawford, her new partner. Jason is identified as a 17-year-old, and the case points straight back to Nichol, the boy who went missing five years earlier. Kennedy had investigated that disappearance already, so the new death does not arrive as a clean start.
One morning, Rob finds a burner phone taped to the handlebars of his bike, and the message on it comes from his mother asking him to meet her. That detail widens the inquiry beyond a single body in the Highlands and gives the series a practical investigative rhythm: each clue forces Kennedy to test family ties, secret contact, and routine habits against the evidence trail.
Bethany, Barclay, and Nichol
Bethany, Jason’s mother, gives the case one of its bleakest moments when she cuts an over-large piece of cake for Crawford after being told of her son’s death. Barclay is Jason’s stepfather, and the review places him inside the orbit of suspicion. The story keeps returning to the gap between grief and proof, which is where this kind of crime drama lives or dies.
The contradiction around Nichol is what stops the case from settling into a neat family tragedy. The evidence suggested that he had run away, even though there was gossip that Barclay killed him, and that friction is now folded into a serial-killer investigation rather than left as old local noise. The first two episodes also bring Michael, Rob’s father, Don, and a local lad older than the dead and missing into view, which is enough to tell viewers the suspect pool is already broad and likely to widen.
From the Shadows
The Dark is based on GR Halliday’s From the Shadows, and the adaptation keeps the source’s bleak structure while pushing the mystery through six episodes instead of rushing it. It opens with an unseen man punching holes in leather straps and carrying a naked body across the Highlands, a visual cue that the series is built around method and ritual rather than a single sudden crime. Swallowed stones, drugged teas, and animals killed and stuffed are the sort of clues that turn the investigation from one death into a pattern.
By the time Kennedy realizes she is on the trail of a serial killer, the series has already done the hard work of making the earlier disappearance matter again. The remaining four hours should be where the show earns its payoff, because the review points to a bleak but satisfying resolution — and that is the right business model for a mystery built to keep pressure on until the end.
