Season 3, Episode 6, Brit Box’s Silk Finally Completely Jumps The Shark

I’ve been enjoying Silk but it’s jumped the shark in Season 3, Episode 1. 

To boil it down, a schizophrenic kid compelled by voices in his head goes berserk in a “kettle”—UK phrase for cops hemming in a crowd—and pushes a cop hard who falls back and cracks his head on a lamppost and dies.

Defending the kid for manslaughter and finally becoming aware during the trial that he’s compelled by voices in his head, his barrister, Martha Costello:

1. doesn’t tell the court the kid is mentally and that she needs to assert that defence; 

2. she instead continues to defend him on the merits, even though she knows he’s done the deed, chancing the possibility of a guilty verdict; 

3. she does this on the theory that the kid’s worst possible fate is to be found guilty by reason of insanity and then have to spend time in a mental institution: apparently, the possibility of life in prison is a better option;

4. further, she puts theories and suppositions to the jury that she knows are false (as opposed to strictly ensuring the prosecution proves each element of the charge beyond a reasonable doubt;

5.  she makes a ludicrous closing statement to the jury that has little to do with the evidence and more to do with an irrelevant story about another of her cases, the outcome of which she falsifies;

6. her rationale for all this bizarre defence work is “bugger the rules, I’m more than just a lawyer in what I’m doing in court for my client”—my paraphrase.  

Then, of course, the kid is found not guilty on the merits and is reconciled with his father ready to get on with his life as though his insanity had just, poof, disappeared. 

Absurdly disappointing!