*Spoiler for the first episode*

Let me start this off by giving you a very brief statement on Tin Star, after this you can either continue to read or learn everything you need to know to make a decision whether to watch it or not, but Tin Star, while it is entertaining, is a colossal mess.
I apologise in advance for ruining the end of the first episode, but it was necessary for the context of this review and the basis for the entire season. Thankfully you can see it coming a mile away so it is not too much of a spoiler. I will try and make a conscious effort to keep anything that might be regarded as a spoiler under wraps, as one of Tin Star’s qualities, as well as one of the main things that it has going for it, is its mystery. Let me explain.


The story follows Jim Worth who was a former undercover police detective from London, played by Tim Roth (of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, The Hateful Eight, The Incredible Hulk, and many many more). Jim and his family have relocated to the small quiet town of Little Big Bear in the Canadian Rockies. It is clear that Jim has a hidden a violent past, but this is only hinted at in the first couple of episodes and develops further as the story goes on (one of the mysteries we are engaged in finding out more of).
Jim has (somehow) become the chief of Police in Little Big Bear and has realised that the town is rather boring. However, one day a large oil company move in and want to build a huge refinery nearby, which will bring in a lot of outside workers, who will naturally cause trouble in the small quiet town, spending their money at the local bars and the intense boredom of a quiet little town will lead people, who are not use to it, to cause chaos, which is exactly what does happen a year later when the refinery is up and running.
The head of security at this oil refinery is a very classic James Bond-esc villain, as well as Christina Hendricks who is in charge of public relations and caught between the company’s interests and her own morals.

Anyway, Jim causes a big of a stir with the oil company, and suddenly a group of men show up, acting like refinery workers, but really they are here to kill Jim. When they do attempt this, they end up missing and killing Jim’s five year old son, causing Jim’s family (who are already hanging on by a thread) to become totally disjointed. His daughter blames Jim because it was clear that they had deliberately targeted him, and his wife has just lost her son and worries for Jim as he might be going back to his old ways.
For you see Jim is a former alcoholic, and when he drinks, he becomes a completely different person; Jack. Jack is the real violent one from Jim’s past and naturally Jim begins to drink and falls back into his old ways. Jack wants revenge for his son’s death and is willing to do whatever he can to stop it.


The story also follows the small band of killers who had tried to murder Jim as they plan what they are going to do next. Not much is given away about this mob, but it is clear, as the story progresses on, that a couple of them actually knew Jack (or at least know of him) and are more than just hired killers, if that is in fact what they are… as the story implies at first that they are just simply contact killers paid for by the head of security at the oil refinery, but there is actually so much more to it.
Whitey; the youngest of the group, who is strangely the most influential of them as well as the most peculiar, was the one who actually fired the shot that killed Jim’s son. He develops a strange fascination with Jim’s daughter and begins to befriend her, with the intention of getting close to the Worth family it would seem, but again, there is actually something far more interesting going on as the story progresses.

After a while things become more deliberate said, and about halfway through you workout what is actually going on, yet the characters do not. You don’t know the exact extent of it, until the penultimate episode which is a complete flashback informing us of the fine details, but you gather that what is first apparent, is far from what is actually going on.

That is basically (the spoiler free edition of) the entire premise of Tin Star. The 10 episodes do not particularly drag. Each one is reasonably well written and keep you engage for the entirety of it, I just really couldn’t help but feel it was a proper mess the further and further it went on.
The first episode is brilliant. Tim Roth is hilarious was the unenthusiastic police chief who doesn’t give a shit about anything but his family (and even that is questionable). After the first episode had ended, I thought to myself that I was really into it and wanted to watch more.
The next few episodes change the pace of it as we are introduced to Whitey and the main story drags as we are introduced into other random plot threads that, now looking back, were completely irrelevant.
Why did we need to watch so much about Frank getting familiar with the bar owner and slowly turning it into a strip club? It served no purpose other than to be filler, however, at the time, I thought it was going to be relevant.
A few other storylines were completely pointless and did not serve the overall story of the series. I felt that Christina Hendricks’ plot was nothing by a massive waste of time as you could have cut all of that out and it would not have made any difference to Jim’s revenge and the destruction that his alternative persona has on his family.

Speaking of which, what is the point of having a split personality, if the other personality acts exactly the same? The only difference I could see was that he was a little bit more violent, he drank (while Jim boasted as being a recovering alcoholic) and he slept with whomever he wanted. Other than that the characters were exactly the same, wasting the whole point of having a split personality. Really, thinking about it, if I did that, no one would believe I was a different personality because I would be acting exactly the same.
It just felt a little wasted, especially because when he slips into this Jack persona, he never changes back… ever! He is just Jack until the end of the season.

Tim Roth was good in this at first, but his unenthusiastic nature (which is of course down to how the creators wanted to make the character) makes him feel as if he is not really bothered about what is going on. I never bought his thirst for vengeance over the death of his son, purely because he does not show us any real emotions. His daughter seems to be the only one upset by the death of the little boy, as the mother appears to be just as blood thirsty as Jack after her initial realisation of the loss of her son. It all feels a bit of a mess.

I felt that this show had a lot of moments, like what I just mentioned, that are really wasted. For example, his wife is injured during the shooting that killed her son, and is in a coma for a short while. When she wakes up and doesn’t know her son is dead, we have a chance for a very big reveal to her and for her to break down, but that never comes.
When Jack finally learns the truth behind why the men are trying to kill him, it felt as if it happened off screen and by the time he confronts the antagonist, he already knows who he is and remembers everything.
Another example is Jim’s drinking. It is first made out to be a massive deal, as we see Jack watching Jim from mirrors and trying to entice him into drinking. He gets so close a couple of times but refuses knowing that he will unleash the beast inside of him and tear up the family. That is until he finally does drink and it just seems to happen. They don’t even make a big point of drawing attention to it. It feels, not only a wasted opportunity, but also a little rushed, which is ironic as the season does have a tendency of moving a crawl in terms of story.

The action is never far away. Jack beating someone up, or someone getting murdered is always looming and it is through these moments that you will be kept entertained. It is when you look through all that and think about the characters themselves that you start to realise that no one knows what they are doing. The writers had this really interesting idea for a story, and for the most part it is written well in terms of dialogue and that, but they did not know how to get the characters from A to B, and so characters change their allegiance or morals all over the place. This is very clear in the final episode when the mum must change her mind about three or four times throughout it.


One of the best things about this series is that Jim/Jack is pulling a Walter White in that you think that since he is the main character, then he must be a good guy, when really he is actually the bad guy as the story develops and everything that has happened, past and present, is all because of his actions, most of the time acting out of either duty or vengeance, almost at the point of blindness of the world around him and the damage that he has caused.

Overall, Tin Star is interesting enough to keep you engage if you are curious in learning the truth behind its mysterious storyline, or if you want a couple of subtle action/fight scenes, but the season is all over the place. There is a lot of hidden filler in amongst the storyline, but most of it you will not even realise until after the show has ended.
While it is a good premise and an interesting overall plot line, it has not been delivered in the greatest of ways and similar new intellectual properties from Sky would probably need to be fine tuned before they reach the light of day. While I will say it is not bad, it is just not as good as the trailers and the build up from Sky themselves lead us to believe. It is a good step in the right direction for Sky, I was just a shame that the one step that they made caused them to become tangled up in a mess of irrelevant plots and poorly delivered explanations, of a mystery that is actually really interesting.

If you curious to watch Tin Star, then you can download all 10 episodes on Sky now.

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