Mercury

This series fairly often takes a turn into the depressing and confusing. It may have something to do with the setting: postwar Scotland, rationing, and a generally unsunny atmosphere. There must be something to the Scottish and British psyche that proves susceptible to this obscure sort of television (and literature, too). For audiences in other countries, I'm not so sure that the dark and confusing plots in the series make as much sense as they do to the people where they were produced. I'm not pleading here for an American-style upbeat and phony cheerfulness and simplicity. But Finlay's plots could have been constructed, it seems to me, in a more understandable manner.