Our Girl

This series is clunky in many ways. It's true that sometimes it comes across like an army recruitment ad. Sometimes the script, acting and plot are too clichéd and the English countryside is an unconvincing stand-in for Afghanistan. But it's fantastic to see a drama revolving around a young cockney woman, Molly Dawes, who in London has a pretty bleak and insular life with few options in the future, and so tries a different tack and joins the army. The army opens up her life, and while she's not sophisticated at all, she does go on a journey that holds your interest. Lacey Turner is very convincing as the, at first, tough London teenager who becomes a scared, out of her depth, bullied, but brave and determined soldier. Too often, British dramas depict cockney girls as tarty losers always at the pub. This series was made with a good heart and I'm enjoying it.

I really enjoyed series 1 of Our Girl. The Pilot was excellent and I was glad they did a series. Ok some of it was a little far fetched but the action was brilliant. I personally felt they made a mistake not keeping Molly (Lacey Turner). Series 2 and onwards is ok, just not as good.

A tale of two female Army medics. Molly Dawes lives with her father, mother and multitude of siblings in a working class area of London. At a dead end, she decides to join the Army. In Season 2 we meet Georgie Lane, an experienced medic who has just been posted to Kenya.

Our Girl started promisingly enough: the story of a working class teen who joins the Army to escape her father, boyfriend, job and everything her neighbourhood represents. The training aspect was interesting, as was the initial Afghanistan plot.

However, already the cracks were beginning to show: the story was not as gritty as you'd want and the military aspects were often implausible. Quite a lot of contrivances and predictable plot developments.

This was still reasonably entertaining though. What really let the series down was the love triangle that turned a war drama into a soap opera. It further undermined the plausibility of the military aspect.

Overall, S1 was okay but nothing more.

Season 2 initially didn't seem much better. I liked the change of main character, for many reasons, but the story still seemed bogged down in empty melodrama. Things got better over the next two episodes with some decent action scenes and tension, though the military aspect is still implausible (e.g. Fighter planes bomb terrorist hideout, nobody goes into the rubble to check that the target is dead - they just assume he is and go home).

Then it's back to the soap opera before a decent action-filled final episode.

Overall I liked S2 slightly more than the first but, as with S1, there's a lot of potential wasted.

Season ratings: S1 6/10, S2 6.5/10.

I saw this series initially by chance and then made a point of watching it.

The acting is very solid and the characters are believable and quite likable. They are the sort of characters that you could genuinely meet down the pub or in Tesco. The military characters are quite realistic, ordinary people doing extraordinary work in sometimes boring and sometimes awful situations.

The lead actress is actually very good at making her character realistic and the series shows some of the 'fish out of water' perspective that a lot of service personnel suffer when they return to normal life. It doesn't try to glorify the situation of the characters or war at all.

I am pleasantly surprised at how good this series is a hope that there are more episodes to come.

Series One is film making to perfection. Well, it's a character-development story, so we can excuse the lame combat scenes with actors forming a nice target while their guns are inadvertently pointing at each other. Molly Dawes is the underdog we all want to succeed, and this movie sets MD in a perfectly human situation: Loser BF, loser role models, she thinks she's smarter than she is (aren't we all guilty of this?) and she's an adult clinging to childhood.

As a Yank, I LOLed at the difference between British boot camp and the Hollywood DIs dressing down recruits. It's painful, though, to see a UK depiction of US Army officers. Tsk tsk.

Series One gives us real character growth, real drama, lots of tugs at the heart, and a scene where MD goes to a church in the last episode was perfection. The actress deserves something north of an Emmy. Series One, including the original movie, is absolutely excellent. I recommend that you watch it and then call this show "done".

Series Two casts MD away. The "more experienced" character is gorgeous and plays her part well, but who can get on board with "rich girl joins army"? The combat scenes are not well thought out, actually a little worse than series one. The story arch is forgettable and cliche. Series Two is an example of good production values mixed with "good looking perfect characters" without humanity. The boyfriend is just a face on an IPad. The officer has always been a friend. The "platoon" (squad?) is always off to the side being a bunch of noisy baboons when they're actually supposed to be Georgia's "family". This series is just two attractive guys with non-military haircuts who interact in stereotypical fashion with the pretty girl.