Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Unit 42’ on Netflix, a Belgian Detective Cyber-Procedural in the ‘CSI’ Vein

Thanks to Netflix, Belgian detective series Unit 42 enjoys a worldwide release after debuting in its native country in 2017 (with a second season slated for later in 2019). It’s a familiar concept: cybercrime is being committed, and someone’s gotta stop it. Enter the newly assembled Unit 42, who hopefully won’t make steal all its moves from CSI and its legion of similar series.

UNIT 42: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The Brussels cityscape reflects on the mirrored windows of a skyscraper — a smart shot repeated moments later in the apartment of a soon-to-be murder victim. (To be totally eggheaded about it, these images tie neatly to the show’s overarching premise of battling crime on the internet, which can be construed as a mirror-world of our own.)

The Gist: A woman comes home, pours a glass of wine and is startled to see a video fire up on her computer unprompted. As she leans toward the monitor to check it out, she’s choked to death by an assailant with a length of cord. Samuel Leroy (Patrick Ridremont) is called to the scene, where he’s thrown together with a new team of investigators, key among them being rookie Billie Vebber (Constance Gay), formerly a white-hat hacker, now a cop.

As expected, their personalities clash: Sam is a calm, mannered veteran, where Billie is brash, unconcerned with proper procedure. He interviews a potential suspect, and smack in the middle of questioning, she barges in and blurts out that he’s got the wrong guy. “I didn’t want you to waste your time,” she says bluntly. He’s done working at 5 p.m.; she’s burning the midnight oil, calling him after hours to help move the case forward. This is an issue, because Sam is a recent widower with three kids, and we see his wife/their mother walking around their home, apparently a ghost.

Sam can’t dismiss Billie outright, because she knows her stuff. She can hack into a webcam faster than you can Instagram your latte. Sam is a Luddite who probably has to flip the USB connector over a dozen times before he can get it to plug into the slot. With Bob Ranck (Tom Audenaert), Alice Meerks (Danitza Athanassiadis) and Nassim Khaoulani (Roda Fawaz) by their sides, and under the direction of Helene Janssens (Helene Theunissen), they’re Unit 42, housed in crummy basement offices and ready to take on evil code monkeys and dastardly developers throughout Brussels.

The script barely makes the obvious Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy life-the-universe-and-everything reference before the killer strikes again. We learn the fiend’s identity before the cops do, and he’s one of the most terrifying individuals in modern society: a telephone customer service rep for a corporate internet service provider. Sam and co. probably would rather fight Godzilla with two slingshots and a butter knife, but they soldier on, led by Billie, who uses her sketchy underground-hacker connections to follow the digital threads. Will they track him down before he kills again? Do you weep every time you hear a robotically pleasant voice on the phone ask if you turned the computer off and back on again? YEP.

Our Take: Nothing new here — yet — but before we move along, we should note that Ridremont and Gay show considerable chemistry as oil-and-water co-workers, and are handed character seeds with growth potential for future episodes. Sam is no doubt stricken by tragedy, and somehow has to keep his family together despite his considerable professional commitments. And we’re surely curious about Billie’s past, potentially pockmarked by associations with amoral keyboard commanders who empty ATMs with a few mouse swipes; she also appears to be nursing a broken heart.

Otherwise, Unit 42 is solid, entertaining, if unexceptional genre fare. It’s overdirected, with lots of “edgy” wobblecam work and about a dozen too many edits per sequence. The plot plays out predictably, but the episode comes together nicely with a tense sequence in which Billie watches the killer attack another woman on a webcam, and hyperventilates as Sam races to disrupt the scene.

Sex and Skin: This episode is heavy on procedural stuff, which means it doesn’t shy away from showing nude female corpses at crime scenes or on the coroner’s slab.

Parting Shot: The camera sways — pointlessly, I might add — as it locks on a nighttime shot of Brussels, thus capping a montage of the main characters returning home to their families or empty apartments.

Sleeper Star: All eyes will be on Gay to see if she brings a fresh dynamic to the tough-girl-with-a-soft-side character trope. She plays the smartest person in the room, and delivers one-liners like she’s cracking a whip.

Most Pilot-y Line: “It’s peaceful here,” Bob says to Sam as they check out their cruddy office space, surely not taking part in any ironic foreshadowing whatsoever.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Unit 42 isn’t cyber-reinventing the cyber-wheel, but so far, it’s generating enough cyber-drama out of a cyber-formula to keep us from tuning out. Give it another cyber-episode or three.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Unit 42 on Netflix