"4. Missing Persons" - Lucky Man S03E04 Review

So once again on Lucky Man, things happen and at the same time not much happens.

To recap: Harry goes to confront Samuel, but his luck turns bad and he barely escapes because he... gets lucky. Or he doesn't. Again, with Lucky Man and the concept in general, it's hard to tell when Harry gets super-lucky, and when he is TV-police-cop lucky. It's hard to get a feel for Harry as some great DI when we don't know that much about what he was like before he got the bracelet.

Most of the episode is dedicated to Harry (and Suri, and Steve: Amara Karan and Darren Boyd) trying to prove that Elsa set Harry up. This involves Neve McIntosh nervously glancing around a lot, and meeting with Samuel to accuse him of betraying her while claiming he was performing a sanctioned MI6 operation. Well, duh: obviously he wasn't. That becomes clearer when we and Elsa discover that DI Dan is actually an ex-military man that Elsa got into his current position. Dan, in case you don't remember, was the man who knocked out Suri from behind last episode and turned her over to Samuel (Rupert Penry-Jones).

Eventually, Harry and the others claim that they have a recording Dan made of Elsa's conversations with Samuel incriminating her. She comes after them, and they explain their ruse. Suri shoves Elsa around and tells her she's now working for her. Elsa then directs them to the cemetery where Eve is at her mother's grave.

But before we get to that point, there are two other subplots. In the first non-Eve subplot, Rich (Stephen Hagan) continues helping his brother. This leads him to an antiques dealer, Arthur (Roger Ashton-Griffiths), who has a scroll relating to the bracelet's history. Two of Madame Cheung's men try to kill him, but Harry arrives and takes one of them out with a lucky (or is it?) throw of a garbage lid which misses the man but knocks an AC down on him.

The men take Harry and Rich to Cheung, who is recovering nicely from being stabbed in the stomach three episodes ago. She makes a lot of ominous noises about how Harry had better recover the second bracelet and in return she'll remove the bracelet from Harry. And if he doesn't, then "Tai Ching" will take care of Harry. Basically, Cheung alternates between vaguely senile and direct-threatening.

And I like this part of the episode the best. Not just because Sarah Lam (Cheung) is having fun with the part. But because I like the banter between Hagan and James Nesbitt. It's a nice older/younger brother relationship without them hitting the typical tropes.

In the second subplot, it turns out that Samuel's men fished Eve out of the river after the previous episode, so she's not dead. Samuel's people do... something to Eve, which presumably turns her against Harry. When Harry and Suri eventually find her, Eve tells Harry that she's going to help Samuel kill him and revel in Harry's death, smiles, and runs off. And I have to admit, this is the best that Sienna Guillory as Eve has been in a while. I like her more as a threat to Harry then as the vaguely-whiny Watcher-like figure that she's been for the last two years. And at least they've given Ms. Guillory something to do. Even when she's been related to the main story, like last year when Eve was Isabella's former friend, Eve was... just there.

Eve does things, sure. Who doesn't? But she's never been seriously involved in the main plots of the first two years. She started the whole thing by putting the bracelet on Harry, sure. But since then she's been pretty... peripheral to everything else that goes on. Now if they'd just give her some basis for turning against Harry. Is she doing it because of Samuel's treatments, or because he's convinced her it's the right thing to do, or what? This week Samuel's doctors give her an injection and suddenly she's all shaky and acting like she's going cold turkey off of some drug. And then she's downright gleefully when smirking at Harry and saying she'll see him dead. And she doesn't seem at all concerned when Harry points out that Samuel is the one who set her up to die.

Ditto for Samuel, who this episode reveals his mother died do to "bad luck" caused by the bracelet giving good luck to its current host. That doesn't explain why he's become a cold-blooded killer. Was he always like that and becoming a bracelet-hunter just happened to jibe with his profession of manipulation and murder? Or did losing his mother turn him "evil"? And why is Samuel taking the drug? Will Eve have to start taking it as well?

We have six more episodes to find out, and if they answer these questions down the road then great. I can only review what I see, and right now it's a bit of a muddle.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?