No Second Chance

this is actually pretty exciting suspenseful tricky plot where you just have to feel for the mother's duress and heartbreak for loosing her small daughter and the hope to find her must keep you watching as well since the police is so incompetent and stupid that makes you want to give up on the show. I recommend you don't. I didn't because I ran out of something good to watch and I don't regret the time spent.

I just finished watching this on PBS Passport with the English subtitles that came with the video stream.

In my opinion there is no way you can predict the real motives and the ending. There are lots of twists to keep all the characters busy and keep you guessing. But you also begin to wonder why, like they add things just so there can be even more characters. The real story is revealed at the end.

Looking back, you should have a number of unanswered questions about the plot and the resolution for some of the characters. There appears to be no official consequences for their actions.

I don't consider the next few sentences a spoiler as I don't believe what I reveal has much if anything to do with the plot. There's a scene with 2 of the alleged bad guys, one male and one female. The female rolls up her shirt and her partner slugs her hard in the abdomen twice I believe and she falls down, but she's OK. That's it. So what purpose did the scene serve? I don't know.

I can't believe PBS picked up this thing. The police alternate reliably between stupidity and cruelty. With a little effort from the writers this might have been ok. Instead it's almost laughably weak.

Bad bits:

-Poorly done, misspelled, and overly foul subtitles. The F's and S's should be replaced with damn's and hell's. They would class the whole thing up, make the film accessible to a wider audience, and be more in line with who these professional characters are.

-Police who weren't as smart as they should have been.

-Many characters (the three young brunettes and the cop, the lawyer, and some other guy I don't remember) looked so much alike that I got them mixed up for a while. (Partially my fault for not having my eyes on the screen the whole time.)

-Red herrings that I would have liked to have seen resolved.

Good bits:

-Great locations.

-A maze of red herrings and twists and an ending I didn't fully expect.

-Loved the trucker character and his role, except for how violent he was at home.

-The bad girl was amazingly scary with her dead eyes.

You get the idea about what kind of series 'No Second Chance' is going to be almost from the start: a woman is shot, her husband murdered, and his daughter kidnapped; yet almost at once the former is out of hospital trying to track down the latter, frequently in open defiance of the police. For good measure, everyone around her seems to be a suspect. It makes sense neither logically nor psychologically, and in consequence I found it hard to get involved with the story, which ultimately is proven to involve at least five perpetrators of at least semi-independent misdeeds. I quite liked the detective who reminded me of Mitterand; but for a serious French policier, watch 'Spiral' instead.