Unforgotten

Jim Warner Wallace was a cold case detective for over 25 years. Memorably, he told the Life & Faith podcast: “When you knock on [someone’s] door and tell them, ‘I’m taking your neighbour to gaol for this case from 30 years ago’, they’ll typically say, ‘there’s no way. No, I’ve known that guy for 30 years. He’s a great guy.’”

As a latecomer to the British crime drama Unforgotten, I have now ploughed through six compelling series and often thought about Wallace’s words as I did. Each series has a similar set up. A body is dug up in a river, or beside a freeway, or in a chimney of a house being renovated. Forensics get to work and inevitably discover it’s a murder victim who has been there for many years. A puzzle presents itself to a team of detectives who begin a campaign to discover the identity of the victim, and the circumstances of their demise. Eventually, a group of people living seemingly unrelated lives are revealed to have some connection with the victim, and slowly what has been hidden for decades is brought into the light.

At every point the characters and their interactions are believable. Everyone, from the lead detectives to the hapless players living with buried regret are flawed and, in a sense, recognisable. They could be the friend you went to school with and haven’t seen for twenty years, your eccentric aunt with a past, your politician grandfather or your English teacher who still appears at your school reunions.

In many respects the series is about guilt.

Crippling guilt that lingers and torments. An oft-repeated scene in Unforgotten is someone at their kitchen bench, or office or bedroom, expectantly looking through a window and immediately recognising the arrival of plain clothes detectives on their street. It’s as if they’ve been waiting for this moment for decades. Are they relieved? Even the characters who are not directly responsible for the death of the victim carry knowledge they have kept to themselves for years, terrified they will be discovered.

Macbeth famously expressed envy for Duncan, whom he had slain, the guilt for which he carried as a heavy burden. “Duncan is in his grave; After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well,” says Macbeth. The sleep of death looks appealing given the anguish of guilt and a restless mind that plagues Macbeth. Unforgotten’s leading players could surely relate.

Noticeable also is how the series conveys our culture’s commitment to the value of human life no matter who or what that life represents. Once discovered, the “forgotten” souls are given the highest priority as the police commit enormous resources of time and money to discovering what happened to them and who is responsible. As viewers we buy into this narrative, believing it to be fundamentally the right thing to do. The whodunnit element is effective in making you indulge in more episodes in an evening than you initially intended, but the emotional buy-in is real as well.

Unforgotten deals in recognisable human foibles and desires, and moments of profound insight and emotional truth. The hunger for justice looms large and drives much of the action. Victims of crimes lost to time——their families left to wonder what happened to them—are afforded some sense of the dignity that has been stripped from them.

Equally evident though is, even when some kind of justice is achieved, it is imperfect and unsatisfying. It doesn’t bring the lost ones home, or recover years lost to grief and despair. Final reckonings and perpetrators heading to gaol feels right and appropriate, but it doesn’t, ultimately, adequately salve the longings of detectives on the case or the families left to carry on. A consistent melancholy and autumnal mood—British dramas seem to specialise in this—pervades each series. 

The church doesn’t get an easy treatment from the writers of this show, usually portrayed as hopelessly ineffective at best and heinously hypocritical at worst. This is not an utterly unfair depiction, even if it lacks nuance. But it strikes me that the biblical story has a lot to say to the world of Unforgotten. Firstly, there’s the concept of being “known by God”, that is right through Old and New Testaments.

The prophet Isaiah conveys God’s heart as he addresses his people in exile when they are feeling totally forgotten by God.

¹⁵ “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
¹⁶ See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are ever before me.” (Isaiah 49:14 – 18)

In Paul’s letter to the Corinthian Church, he describes an ultimate destination that captures a reality we only glimpse in this life: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

The concept here is one of intimate knowledge of each person, known and loved by God. And because it is God we are talking about, nobody is ever “forgotten”.

Encapsulated in this vision are other key concepts that flow from that foundation. There is hope for true, final and complete justice when the God of the universe is able, in a manner that only he can, to mend broken things and bring forth redemptive resolutions to all that has been lost.

The eternal, bestowed value of every human being forms the backdrop to that redemptive action of a God who won’t let his children be taken from him.

As Jim Warner Wallace says in relation to his own exertions to solve cold cases: “I think a lot of it is that we have a high regard for human life … We actually think that there’s something unique about humans designed and created in the image of God. That means that even if that case goes cold for 35 years, I should go back and open it again because that’s not a small thing.”

And central to this Christian story is the cross and its claims of power to invert expectations and create new possibilities that are otherwise unthinkable. One of those possibilities is forgiveness and freedom from the weight of guilt. So many of the characters in Unforgotten—even the police—are plagued with guilt for wrongs committed, sins of omission and responsibilities abandoned. They wish they could wash the blood from their hands. That they can’t do it on their own is a conundrum the audience understands instinctively. And it’s one that the Jesus story claims to be able to solve—sacrifice on behalf of all of us, such that God will never fail to “remember” us, but if we ask him, he will truly “forget” the wrongs each of us have committed against him, and against others.

Simon Smart is Executive Director of the Centre for Public Christianity and author of The End of Men?