Scared to fly? Look away now. TV series Departure hits the right buttons

Does any image represent the dreams and fantasies that all too easily can turn into nightmares more viscerally than the helpless passenger in the aeroplane?

I’ve just caught up with the new season of the Canadian disaster thriller Departure, which, like the first two iterations, kicks off from the morbid fascination all of us have for what happens when things crash – whether they be cars, aircraft, ships or trains.

Does any image represent the dreams and fantasies that all too easily can turn into nightmares more viscerally than the helpless passenger in the aeroplane? Or those shocking train crashes when carriages spin off the rails, wheels shrieking, jackknifing through the air, the wreckage still burning for the evening news. Or those ships propelled by massive marine engines trying to right themselves as wind and heavy seas force the vessels to lean at dangerous angles causing them lower into the water?

We see crashes as inexplicable, beyond our ability to control or even place within our sense of reality, no matter how banal the explanations turn out to be.

Departure certainly makes great play about the way crashes fascinate and terrify us, reminding us of just how easy it is to die.

And the series, while a little linear in context compared to the higher-end dramas from Netflix and HBO, with their shocking violence and visceral production details, is a satisfying and tightly produced procedural. It entertainingly evokes a world etched in uncertainty and suspicion, where a menacing atmosphere is darkened by a toxic environment and an often hostile community.

We don’t see much classy Canadian TV here, despite the huge success of Schitt’s Creek and Orphan Black, though recently the brilliant Cardinal hung in on SBS, adapted across several seasons from the award-winning Forty Words for Sorrow, the first of a sequence of six bestselling crime novels written by Ontario native and award-winning author Giles Blunt.

Departure is from Canadian broadcaster Global and developed by the industrious Shaftesbury Films, its slate including the hugely successful Murdoch Mysteries, detective drama Frankie Drake, Houdini & Doyle and the anthology horror series Slasher.

Departure was created by newcomer Vincent Shiao, with Jackie May serving as showrunner and Canadian Screen Award winner T. J. Scott as director and executive producer, already an old hand in Canada with many productions to his credit. They include episodes of Star Trek, Gotham, Bates Motel, Frontier, Longmire, Spartacus, Black Sails, Dark Matter, 12 Monkeys, The Strain, Hemlock Grove, and Constantine, to name a few. It’s a considerable resumé and his experience is all over Departure.

The series also comes with some high-level star power. Emmy-winner Archie Panjabi, best known as Kalinda Sharma in The Good Wife, is implacable Kendra Malley, a senior investigator for the fictional Transport Safety and Investigations Bureau. Christopher Plummer is Howard Lawson, the senior manager of the TSIB and Kendra’s mentor. Plummer died during the shooting of Departure’s second season, filming all his scenes from his own home in Connecticut because of the Covid-19 pandemic. He’s a delight to watch; suaveness and polish personified.

Shiao, a former accountant, wrote the pilot in 2015, the year after Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared over the Indian Ocean, inspired by the investigative aspect of plane crashes. And also by the successful Canadian series called Mayday, or here, Air Crash Investigations, still screening on the Seven network.

Each episode of this surprisingly gripping series features a detailed re-enactment of a real-life air emergency, using voice recorders and air traffic-control transcripts, 3D graphics and diagrams, as well as witness accounts and interviews with aviation experts.

Not only highly dramatic and stylishly produced, the long-running series reassuringly sheds light on the safety issues at the heart of aviation industry controversies as well as the biggest industrial problem of recent years: pilots learning to cope with increased automation.

“I always wondered why isn’t there a drama about these types of investigators who try to solve the mysteries of plane crashes around the world,” Shiao says. Still, he never expected Departure to actually get made, the pilot written on spec and used as a calling card to get TV jobs when he decided to turn his screenwriting hobby into a full-time career.

The script got shopped around to producers in the US before landing with Toronto’s Shaftesbury. And in production, it’s directed with immersive skill by Scott, who has a nice understanding of the prerequisites for this kind of drama, and avoids trying too hard to subvert expectations and give his stories unique life by twisting them in new directions.

He plays it pretty straight, highlighting the whodunit aspects of the stories, while at the same time highlighting the emotional effect of some terrible events on the community in which they occur; and the relationship to death and bereavement to those who live within it.

It’s a techno procedural really, an investigation into the methodology behind the madness of tragic crashes, closely allied to the cop version but without the complicating narrative aspects of police involvement.

Police procedurals are under increasing progressive attack at the moment, and have been for some time, demanding producers deliver cop shows that address police brutality and misconduct and incorporate conversations about race and racism, the term “copaganda” often raised within critical discussions.

For these critics, the image of policing largely reflected in TV cop shows often serves to shield police from accountability and sceptical coverage, boosts public relations of police departments, and portrays a version of policing that is dramatically different from reality, particularly in regard to the treatment of marginalised communities.

But Departure presents its characters largely as scientists or bureaucrats working as a team determined to solve technological puzzles, looking forensically at the critical moments before, during and after catastrophes and near-misses.

The first season centres on the disappearance of Flight 716, following the investigation into a doomed passenger plane that vanishes over the Atlantic Ocean. Malley is brought in by Lawson to lead the team looking into the crash. She is still devastated by the recent death of her husband and struggling to parent her troubled stepson. Each new discovery only deepens the mystery surrounding the disaster, revealing a host of suspects and motives – pilot suicide, terrorism, systems failure, politically motivated murder.

The second season sees Kendra and her team dealing with the crash of an automatic superfast train, the Apollo, on its way from Toronto to Chicago. At 140mph (225km/h), it inexplicitly loses control at a tough turn and hits a tanker truck at a level crossing, the driver apparently committing suicide, a gun found nearby, possibly thrown clear. Seventy-two passengers are dead, including the driver. Kendra calmly works her way through the tangles that the investigation reveals, drawing closer to its primary actors, of whom there are many.

The third season is the best so far. Kendra and the team are investigating the mystery of the Queen of the Narrows car ferry, destined for St John’s, Newfoundland, which sinks in record time during a fierce storm with most of its passengers on board.

The investigation is the focus of the plot as Malley and her team quickly congregate on site in the attempt to determine just what caused the capsizing of the ship. Initially, it seems the doors to the vehicle dock somehow opened during the weather incident, water able to enter the vessel through openings in the hull, the Queen of the Narrows sinking lower in the water until completely submerged.

But just what caused a sudden turning of the ship, a manoeuvre not in keeping with maritime convention and the sudden exit of the captain from the bridge? Who are the young people with their dog Solo sheltering among the cars, and what of the gunshots heard by survivors?

Scott, a fine action mechanic, handles the impact of the ocean on the ferry and various underwater scenes with skill, the many narrative twists astutely engineered.

Panjabi is a good lead, if a little deadpan at times, quietly anchoring the show, and this season, the nerdish Theo, played with a nice side of drollery by Mark Rendall, returns to the team. Cihang Ma is newcomer Michelle, who not only provides support to the survivors, but has the occasional epiphany to move the plot along.

All of them deal with the jargon and seemingly inexhaustible acronyms that are such a part of this kind of techno thriller with just enough authority, the TV monitors almost a group of other characters. And as a whodunit, it’s as much about the emotional effect of some terrible events on the community in which they occur, and the relationship to death and bereavement to those that live within it.

Departure, all three seasons streaming on SBS On Demand.