Very Disappointed with the Australian Drama "Glitch"

 There's an excellent review of this series from the Guardian, and it says some of what I'm going to say, but I think it's too kind.

One of these days we're going to find out that scriptwriters play some sort of forfeits game with each other. Scriptwriter 1 texts Scriptwriter 2 and says "This week you must write an alien, a racist, and a murder into your script" (or forfeit a bottle of Laphroaig). And Scriptwriter 2 must go ahead and do so.

This is what Glitch feels like. It's as if you've been thrown a strange mystery which, rather than resolving, just becomes ever more ridiculous until you realize you've been hoodwinked. The writers never knew the solution, and they're just going to keep on until you realize this yourself.

The premise itself is excellent: seven people inexplicably crawl out of their graves in a rural Australian town. They're in the best of health, but they have no idea what has brought them back. Gradually it becomes clear that the town's public health doctor is somehow connected to the mysterious resurrection, as is the secretive pharmaceuticals factory that seems to employ much of the town's population.

In any sane scenario, the scriptwriters would know what underlies the mysterious events and would explain them all by the end of the series. But in this series, they clearly have no idea why things are happening, and thus they continue to spin the plates (and add several more) in every episode, hoping that the actors and the cliffhangers will distract us.

It took me fully until the end of series 2 to realize that they were just stringing us along. There's an invisible border around the town that ensures the resurrected cannot leave, but it's never explained how or why it works (and how it's so precise). John/William, a resurrected deserter from the British navy in the nineteenth century, is given a strange dog whistle that summons memories in the resurrected, but we are never told how or why. Dr. Elishia McKellar, the public health doctor, who may have a history with the deserter, transpires to be one of the resurrected herself, but is able to travel in and out of the town without difficulty. Phil Holden, a local part-Aboriginal(?) layabout, dies at sea many hundreds of miles away, and returns to the town transformed. Now armed with a magical ability to talk to the dead and resurrected (even in their sleep), he joins forces with Sarah Hayes, the wife of the local police sergeant, to kill all of the resurrected. He doesn't know why he's doing this, and neither does Sarah.

And James Hayes, that poor police sergeant. He's possibly the worst policeman in Australia. As the bodycount rises, he announces again and again that they can't possibly call in "the feds". By the time season two has finished, he's killed, maimed, arrested or detained half the cast at some stage or another. His continuing mission is to tell people to "stay there" while he investigates the next atrocity, only to return and find them gone.

As the show, which was filmed in Castlemaine, progresses, we're given tiny little hints here and there that may or may not be relevant. Elishia appears to have been in love with the deserter - did this mass resurrection happen by accident, as she tried to revive him? If so, we're left in the dark as to why she was happily living as a lesbian in Melbourne before moving to the town. Patrick Fitzgerald, the potty-mouthed Irish-born ex-mayor of the town, murdered by his son a century and a half earlier, wants the law to recognize that his manor house (now up for sale) should go to the descendants of his Aboriginal mistress, and only obliquely do we see (I think) that the buyer of the manor house is Noregard, the pharmaceuticals company that seems to run the town from the shadows.

Ah, yes. Yoorana. The town. It's supposed to be a one-horse town in the outback, but it's big enough to have trains coming through at all times of the night. There are pleasant outdoor cafés. There are wide streets, and a high school to which Beau, Paddy's new sidekick, goes. There's a nicely manicured public park where you can walk your baby. So where is everybody? There's the eerie sense in this story that a neutron bomb has gone off and killed everybody but the cast.

 What do I think about watching the third series? I couldn't give a Castlemaine XXXX.