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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Line of Duty: Could Jo Davidson End Tommy Hunter’s Legacy For Good?

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Warning: contains spoilers for Line of Duty series one to six.

Considering that Tommy Hunter has only appeared on screen in four of Line of Duty’s 36 episodes – once in real time, once in a video clip, once in flashback, and once as an unrecognisable bandage-wrapped burns victim – the character casts a long shadow over the police thriller. Whatever and whoever AC-12 has investigated over the years, Tommy’s organised crime group and corrupt officers have been somewhere in the mix, wearing balaclavas, slitting throats and making a mockery of the law.

Though he died in the series two opener, Tommy’s legacy endures. You might call him the show’s root antagonist, the daddy of the baddies. Trace the death of almost any guest star, from Tony Gates to Lindsay Denton to Danny Waldron to John Corbett, and, as the man who groomed Dot ‘The Caddy’ Cottan and Ryan Pilkington, it all leads back to Tommy.

Jo Davidson’s Family DNA Revelation

Series six’s guest star, we learned in episode five, literally leads back to Tommy. DNA analysis shows that Acting Superintendent Joanne Davidson is not only Tommy Hunter’s daughter (a fan theory held since Kelly Macdonald was announced as joining the cast on account of her shared Glaswegian background with Brian McCardie, the actor who played Tommy) but as a product of incestuous abuse, she’s also his niece. In his teens, we assume that Tommy raped his sister, resulting in Jo’s birth.

Jo Davidson is currently leading the investigation into the murder of Gail Vella, a journalist shot dead by Tommy’s former OCG unit to stop her from revealing long-standing connections between organised crime and corrupt police officers. Specifically, Vella was looking into the officers who suppressed the investigation of the racist murder of Lawrence Christopher in 2003, and covered up the 1998 murder of a social worker reporting child sex abuse claims from Sands View children’s home. The link between those two cases is DCI Marcus Thurwell, a character we’ve yet to meet but who will be played by James Nesbitt.

Under duress, Davidson has been disrupting the Vella investigation on behalf of the OCG. While it’s clear to viewers that she’s been forced into corruption and is deeply unhappy about what she’s been doing, what hasn’t been clear until now is what hold the OCG has over her. Now, it seems likely that Jo’s being blackmailed over her familial link to Tommy Hunter. Let’s say Jo grew up not knowing who her biological father was, but the OCG (perhaps via Tommy’s son Darren, or – if he’s H – DCI Marcus Thurwell) knew. They told Davidson, threatening to make the scandal public, which forced her to do their bidding to keep it secret. It’s one possible scenario.

Tony Gates, Jackie Laverty and AC-12 vs Evil

Even without the incestuous abuse angle, having Tommy Hunter as a father is nothing any decent person could boast about. What little we saw of him in series one and two showed him to be a villain of the highest order. Cruel, arrogant and conscienceless, the character doesn’t have a single redeeming feature. If Line of Duty can be read as a moral battle, with AC-12 representing the human struggle to do good, then Tommy Hunter represents pure evil. He may not be the hypocrite that corrupt police officers are, but he’s a sort of devil in this show.

The first few times we encountered Tommy, it was as an anonymous voice on the phone. In series one, Tommy’s goons had killed DCI Tony Gates’ lover Jackie Laverty, a property developer who laundered money for his unit, and were threatening to frame him for her murder. Using a 12-year-old Ryan Pilkington as a phone thief and go-between, Tommy blackmailed Gates into covering up the gang’s drug murders at Greek Lane, mischaracterising them as terrorism-related. Tommy’s unit dealt drugs on the impoverished Borogrove Estate, laundering their money through a series of fake businesses.

Even on the phone, Tommy was a nasty piece of work. He laughed at Gates’ torment and his cruelty showed no limits. He had Jackie killed, Gates beaten up, killed Gates’ dog, threatened his children, almost had Steve Arnott’s fingers amputated… When Gates finally tracked him down and arrested him, he succeeded in getting him to confess to having ordered the Greek Lane murders but thanks to Tommy’s corrupt officers (including DS Dot Cottan, ACC Hilton and very likely CI Philip Osborne), the evidence Gates had gathered was never used and Tommy wasn’t charged. He gave evidence backing up the false terrorism claim, and claimed immunity from prosecution.

Carly Kirk, Lindsay Denton and the Ambush

In series two, Tommy’s villainy only grew with the story of 15-year-old Carly Kirk. Despite supposedly being in witness protection and living under the new identity of Alex Campbell, Tommy was still running his OCG unit behind the scenes. He had refused to leave the local area, citing health reasons, still drove a car registered to him, and continued to deal drugs, launder money and blackmail and bribe police officers. One such was his witness protection officer DS Jayne Akers, whom Tommy paid to turn a blind eye to his criminal activity.

That activity included the sexual exploitation of underage girls groomed by corrupt Vice officers Manish Prasad and Jeremy Cole. Tommy’s gang pimped out girls including Carly Kirk, a child in foster care whom Tommy used in his plan to blackmail DCI Mike Dryden. Prasad arranged for Dryden to have sex with Carly in his car, where he would be photographed for blackmail material. When Dryden spotted his ex-lover Lindsay Denton spying on him with the girl, he threw Carly out and drove away. Denton then witnessed Prasad and Tommy Hunter arrive, when Tommy savagely beat Carly and dragged her away by her hair.

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At some point in witness protection, Tommy became worried that his immunity deal would be reneged on, and started threatening to expose the corrupt officers working for him, from The Caddy, to Manish and Cole and “the two-faced bastard” at the top (ACC Hilton, CI Philip Osborne or following the recent retcon, perhaps DCI Marcus Thurwell). That led Dot Cottan to arrange his murder, using Jayne Akers to recruit Lindsay Denton into diverting the convoy transporting him so he could be killed. Tommy suffered full-body burns in the ambush and was later murdered by Jeremy Cole in hospital, dying aged 48.

Sands View and Danny Waldron

After his death, Tommy’s villainy grew even further. Ronan Murphy was part of a child sexual abuse ring at Sands View children’s home, where DS Danny Waldron had grown up. Murphy and his uncle Linus were among Tommy Hunter’s closest associates. When Waldron encountered Murphy on an op, he killed him in revenge and crossed his name off a list of 17 childhood abusers he had identified. On that list was Tommy Hunter’s name, crossed out, proving that his OCG unit hadn’t only operated the child sex abuse ring, but he was also one of the paedophiles who’d committed the abuse. (Which makes you wonder about Tommy’s treatment of Dot Cottan and Ryan Pilkington, both of whom he’d recruited for the gang in their early teens. Were they also victims of Tommy’s sexual abuse?)

In series six, Tommy’s family story took on yet another horrid layer with the revelation that Tommy had a son, Darren Hunter, who was one of a gang of racist white youths who’d attacked black architect Lawrence Christopher, leading to his death in police custody in 2003. Darren Hunter and his collaborators were never charged with the murder, thanks to Tommy’s relationships with corrupt officers. The SIO on the Lawrence Christopher case was Marcus Thurwell, who’d also led the cover-up into the OCG murder of Oliver Stephens-Lloyd, the social worker who’d pursued the Sands View victims’ allegations of sexual abuse.

Could Jo Turn Good Cop?

So that’s Jo Davidson’s father: an incestuous rapist, paedophile, violent pimp, sex trafficker, drug baron and racist who ordered murders and torture while bribing and blackmailing his way through Central Police to keep him in business. Putting to one side the senior officers who appeased him, Tommy’s the worst of the worst. Dead or not, he more or less is the OCG, Line of Duty’s perennial baddies. A poster boy for criminal evil.

Which leaves series six in a fascinating dramatic position. The product of one of Tommy’s many, many crimes is Jo Davidson. If Line of Duty is drawing to a close, there would be poetic justice in Jo being the one to finally unveil Tommy’s bent coppers and bring his former OCG unit down. If, in the remaining two episodes, Jo were to turn and work with Kate and AC-12, then Tommy Hunter the symbol, Tommy Hunter the devil, could be ultimately vanquished by an instrument of his own making…

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Line of Duty continues on Sunday the 25th of April at 9pm on BBC One.

The post Line of Duty: Could Jo Davidson End Tommy Hunter’s Legacy For Good? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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intj-the-cynical-idealist · 7 years

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The Human Perception of Good and Evil.

Please read completely and comment thoughtfully.

Say you ask the average person whether they liked a movie that recently came out. Some people will say things along the lines of “Eh it was alright.” But the majority of people who reply, especially young people, will either tell you they “loved it” and “it was awesome” or “it was terrible.” and they “hated it. Sure, there will be people who stay in the middle, but when forced to decide whether it was “good” or “bad,” they will have a tendency to choose either extreme. This is why we have “haters.” We as humans don’t like to say that something isn’t good, we like to say that it is terrible, even irredeemable so

Now imagine that we’re aren’t talking about a movie. The stakes are high and patience is wearing thin. Say this is a discussion about abortion for example. Are you going to calm down and be reasonable and realize that maybe your not completely right and the other person isn’t necessarily and evil pig? Maybe, but that takes brainpower, and when something takes brainpower over a large sample of people making the decision, the majority is going to fail.

For centuries now, the world has been developing a quick patch for this issue. If we dislike people who have strong, emotional opinions because they’re usually acting unreasonably, why don’t we just say that neither side is right, and the only thing that is morally wrong is saying that what you believe is right is right for everyone? At first glance, that seems perfectly reasonable, in fact it sounds like it will fix all kinds of conflicts. The problem is that just because people are too stupid too deal with complex issues of right and wrong consistently, doesn’t mean that right and wrong don’t exist.

People simply can’t avoid throw the baby out with the bathwater. But just because the water is the filth of human hatred and narrow-mindedness does not mean that the baby of true objective morality should go out the window. Why can’t we deal with other people doing something that is morally wrong without shunning and stigmatizing them? And why can’t we deal with our own sins and shortcomings without resorting to either complete shame or denial that what your doing is wrong? People say things that imply that killing a fetus is okay, not because it is objectively permissible, but because you “have no right to tell someone else what is right and what is wrong.” And yet under that well meaning assertion, morality itself crumbles.

People fear the unfair stigma brought down by strictly religious, but they have no problem condemning terrorists, murderers, rapists, abusers, bigots and racists. Why is this? Because they know these things are wrong and should be labeled as such. And yet as soon as we humans can relate to someone’s situation, we lose the ability to productively chastise them. We have no trouble vilifying child abusers, after all they “deserve” it. We conveniently turn a blind eye to their humanity because we can distance themselves from them. “If I had a child, I would never do something like that.” And yet someone did do something like that, a human being. We are all human beings, we don’t claim the right to condemn others for falling to the flaws of human nature that we ourselves also possess.

The human brain doesn’t like making complex moral decisions. We like to have things come in black, white, or a grey that indicates not both black and white, but the absence of either. We struggle with the idea that people who make mistakes deserve forgiveness, because we don’t want to need forgiveness ourselves. In this desire to turn what we like into what is truly good (because we like ourselves) we forget that people aren’t purely good or purely evil. A woman who gets an abortion does a bad thing, so our emotional brains, which have an extremely hard time balancing moral subtitles say that she is “bad.” And yet we know that she’s not. We see what led her too that decision and imagine ourselves in her shoes. We imagine her fear and indecision and can’t help but think that she is a good person making a tough decision. But then, our simple brains change tracks. If we empathize with that woman, she must be a “good” person, and therefore her decisions are permissible. The struggle rages until our moral decision making skills are confused into choosing one of the three options. Black, white, or an ambiguous grey where we inject enough reason into the situation to realize that black and white don’t work in a system of categorizing people into good or evil, but don’t inject enough reason to actually command our moral judgment intellectually.

Its easy to make quick, moral judgement based on what you feel. Its also easy to make rational arguments that ultimately result in all emotional moral alignments being false, and therefore relative to the individual. What is difficult, really almost impossible, for an individual to maintain, is a functional union of rational moral judgement and emotional moral judgement. The reason that we have so many issues with controversy in this day and age is that it is simply impossible to get everyone functioning at a high moral level simultaneously We fail at listening to our instincts about right and wrong, without making a mess of the very values we claim to protect. Only through the balance of our rational and intuitive selves can we achieve meaningful conversation about controversial topics that is compassionate and fair to everyone involved.

#Controversy #good and evil #good and bad #right and wrong #morality #emotions #human nature #People are Stupid

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