We kept an eye on Martin Compston over the festive period for you, and the good news is, it looks like he’s doing okay.
After last week’s understated but incredibly powerful Mayflies, yesterday all six episodes of the first Amazon original series to be filmed entirely in Scotland, The Rig (Prime Video), finally arrived.
It’s the polar opposite of last week’s show.
Big money, big cast, big idea
The Rig has had a sizeable amount of hype for months now; partly because of its high-quality ensemble cast, partly because it looks like the kind of thing real money has been invested in, and to a degree simply because the central idea really grabs the attention.
The brief elevator pitch is: a bunch of people work on the North Sea’s fictional Kinloch Bravo oil rig, when a mysterious fog descends, all communication is cut off and sinister, supernatural things start to happen.
Baz (Calvin Demba) falls from a high tower, his body apparently smashed to near death. Within hours, though, he’s walking the rig like a zombie, murmuring to himself about ominous events on the horizon.
It’s an ensemble affair, but there are three core characters: Compston’s typically guarded but volatile communications officer Fulmer, Iain Glen’s embattled rig commander Magnus, and Rose, played by Emily Hampshire, who’s visiting from rig operators Pictor.
A promising show
Rose and Fulmer are in a relationship, but while he wants more, she’s ambitious to get on, so she can reach the boardroom and curb the company’s environmental impact.
The trio are alumni of the hits Line of Duty, Game of Thrones and Schitt’s Creek, alongside fellow class actors Mark Bonnar, Rochenda Sandall, Owen Teale and more.
We can only review based on the first three episodes of the show Amazon sent us, so maybe it all falls to pieces in the end, but so far The Rig is a very satisfying show, almost despite itself.
It doesn’t shy away from cliché, but it handles them with skill, and viewers might have fun spotting the patchwork of movie influences which feed into Cromarty-raised first-time writer David Macpherson’s confident script.
There are shades of The Thing, The Fog, the first two Alien films and Event Horizon, as well as the tone of urgent, serious BBC dramas like Vigil – although it’s probably not a spoiler to note that Compston’s character doesn’t die in the first episode here.
Ancient horror within Earth
What The Rig most resembles, however, is Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who from the early 1970s, with its sense of environmental conscience and greedy big business being undone by an ancient horror from within the Earth.
Lone workers wander baddie-haunted yards on their own and are picked off one by one, while everyone buys the increasingly arcane plot explanations just a little too easily. Yet it looks great and the actors seem to be enjoying every minute.
More than that, though, it’s genuinely sinister. Mostly shot indoors at the vast First Stage Studios in Leith, the viewer nevertheless gets a real sense of the eerie isolation of North Sea rig work and the melting pot of personalities this fosters.
It’s no award-winner, but it deserves to be a hit.
