'Code of Silence' Fell Apart Because of Alison's Terrible Decisions

Spoilers

I was fairly high on the first half of Britbox’s new summer series Code of Silence. The show follows Alison (Rose Ayling-Ellis), a deaf woman who uses her lip-reading ability to help the police spy on a criminal gang planning a jewelry heist.

Alison, desperate to prove herself, takes a bartending job at the pub the criminals frequent and even strikes up a romance with the gang’s computer hacker, Liam (Kieron Moore). Early on, her overeagerness actually repeatedly jeopardizes the case, but I assumed this was setup, that she’d learn from those mistakes and grow into a sharp, capable informant.

But that never happens. Alison’s decision-making is consistently disastrous, right up to the bitter end. She doesn’t grow; she stumbles. Her choices directly lead to a bodyguard’s death, a police officer’s serious injury, and nearly blowing the entire operation, if not for Liam’s inexplicable soft spot for her. What’s maddening is how quickly the series devolves into other characters rescuing Alison from herself. I honestly thought we’d moved past the damsel-in-distress trope in mainstream dramas, yet Code of Silence doubles down on it for six long episodes.

Here’s the short version, because I could list her blunders all day. Strike one: Alison falls for Liam, the very man she’s supposed to be informing on. They hook up in the hotel targeted for the heist, and she seriously considers running away with him once he pulls it off.

Strike two: While informing on Liam, she unwittingly lets him hack her phone so that her hearing aid becomes a live bug, handing him her conversations with the police. Liam, predictably, uses Alison to send the cops to a fake location while the real heist goes down elsewhere.

Strike three: Alison figures this out but, rather than alert the police, tries to stop an armed burglary by herself. I guess she thought if she just asked really nicely, they’d give up. The result? A dead bodyguard, an injured officer, and Liam still escaping with the necklace.

From there, the spiral continues. Fired from the case but unwilling to quit, Alison agrees to meet Liam when he reaches out. Does she alert the police that she’s about to rendezvous with their fugitive target? Of course not. She meets him only to say she won’t run away with him and then lets him walk. When she immediately gets abducted and held hostage by Braden — the man Liam double-crossed — Liam has to swoop in again, sacrificing himself to save her and tipping off the police in the process. In other words, the cops succeed in spite of Alison, not because of her.

By the finale, she’s inexplicably rewarded with a $50,000 payout and told she should study criminal forensics, even though she’s failed at nearly every turn. Her deafness isn’t the issue — her recklessness is. She repeatedly meddles, ignores orders, and barrels into danger, leaving others to clean up the mess.

It’s infuriating. Rose Ayling-Ellis delivers a strong performance with what little she’s given, but the writing does her no favors. Instead of a layered, complex heroine, we get a reckless, impatient character flailing from one bad decision to the next while the characters around her save the day. For a series that began with so much promise, Code of Silence ends up as one of the most frustratingly regressive dramas I’ve seen in a long time.