Observer, 18 February 2001, by Kathryn Flett
"Young, free and er, simple?: You don't need to be a genius 
to understand teenagers but some experience in genetics 
might help."
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Silent Witness BBC1

Teenagers, eh? In "Silent Witness," two dead girls were 
discovered in a Norwegian ski resort and defrosted by Amanda 
Burton's chilly pathologist, Sam Ryan, to reveal the kind of 
tangled emotional plots that, had they managed to stay alive 
long enough, they would probably have left behind by their 
twenties.

One of the dead girls, Ruth, was a virgin while the other, 
Louise, had been pregnant with twins. It turned out that one 
of the twins had been fathered by her uncle (Anthony Head, 
so sinister he couldn't possibly be the murderer) and the 
other by a nice, earnest young man who worked for a travel 
company (obviously guilty). So they weren't really twins at 
all. I must lead a very sheltered life, but the possibility 
of this kind of genetic pick'n'mix came as a revelation.

Then Anthony Head turned out not to be Louise's uncle, but 
her father, so one of her unborn children would have 
beenwhat, precisely? Her own sister, as well as her 
daughter? This was a complex set of circumstances even by 
teenage standards. And then it got worse, as the real 
murderer turned out to be neither of the prime suspects, but 
an employee of her father's - or at least the man we had 
assumed to be her father - who was keen to put Louise and 
the other girls preyed upon by the amoral Anthony Head out 
of their perceived misery. He may have had a point.

One could tell that Professor Ryan had got a bit too 
involved in this case because, very occasionally, she'd 
reach out to make physical contact with the living, though 
always with considerably less relish than she showed for the 
dead. There are signs, however, that like last week's 
corpses, brittle Sam might be thawing - though we may not 
like what is revealed when she does. Still, in a bold leap 
forward for her character, Burton didn't once have to sit in 
a car in the rain, biting her lip pensively while 
contemplating the navels, spleens, livers and brains of 
murder victims. On the wall of her office there is even a 
recently installed pinboard decorated with postcards and 
snapshots - all heartwarming signs of life, if not yet quite 
a life.



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