| This quirky little 6-part series is British rather than American (shown on Channel 4 in 1998) and follows the adventures of a special unit which has the unusual task of hunting down and exterminating, people infected with Code 5 – in other words, vampires!
The main characters include:
Mike Colefield (Jack Davenport), a police officer for ten years, best friends of Jack and Kirsty.
Kirsty (Colette Brown), a primary school teacher who has known Mike and Jack since university.
Vaughan Rice (Idris Elba), an ex-serviceman, retired after the Gulf War due to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Pearse Harman (Philip Quast), a priest, but also the head of the unnamed government organisation.
Angie March (Susannah Harker), a medical researcher.
Jack Berrisford (Stephen Moyer), a police officer for ten years, fiancée of Kirsty and a friend of Mike's.
Frances (Fiona Dolman), an old friend and ex-girlfriend of Mike's, who works in a security-sensitive area.
01. Habeas Corpus
The viewer has the feeling of being chucked into the middle of an on-going story and the mystery is revealed slowly. A police informant is killed by a man who has no reflection and who is invisible to security cameras. A policeman, Jack Beresford, disappears on the eve of his wedding to Kirsty and people alleged to be from the Complaints Investigation Branch are hunting him down because he is a bent copper. His best mate and fellow copper, Michael Colefield, who clearly fancies the abandoned bride, has his doubts, especially after he watches a SWAT team shoot down the killer mercilessly.
Then the bent copper comes out as a vampire and gets himself blown to bits! But before that, he reveals that the CIB bunch are out to exterminate his kind and that's why he went bent – to get money to fight back. The surviving copper, Michael, is approached by what looks like a Church police force, which collects the remains of dead vampires and stores them in a multi-compartment giant freezer system with ultraviolet lights to stop them regenerating. Their theory is that the vampires have plans for normal humans – they want to put them into battery farms as food animals. But the Church police are out to stop them.
02. In Nomine Patris
The episode opens with a biker in a road-rage incident smashing the tinted windows of a car, which runs over his girlfriend while the driver escapes, smoking furiously. The part-fried vampire in the car is identified as the son of a rich businessman and the Church Police believe that his father is involved in a plan to set up safe houses for vampires. A female broker is also helping the son with his deals on the futures market.
Only it turns out that the 'son' is really the businessman's father, who has retained the physical appearance of age 34 since the 1940s. He took the place of his grandson, who died of an overdose and who was buried in the grounds of their large house. The Church Police intercept the money when the businessman liquidates his assets, the biker gets chomped and his girlfriend, who has been vampirized, explodes all over Miks's flat. So Vaughan suggests that it is time to move.
03. Sub Judice
A journalist, Jacob, is looking for Michael and the Church Police are harassing Marion Wainwright, a barrister, and digging up empty coffins. Wainwright has made a career out of trying to get pregnant and she seems to be having a phantom pregnancy after IVF treatment. Only the vampires, of whom her husband is one, have been experimenting on her. Wainwright escapes from the clutches of the Church Police and meets her vampire husband, who is shot and explodes shortly before he expires. And the husband of Dr. March, the lady doctor in the Church Police turns out to be one of the vampires in the cold store! Meanwhile, Kirsty asks Jacob to help her find Mike, and Frances, Mike's former girlfriend, tracks him down at his new flat because she is interested in knowing more about his new career.
04. Mea Culpa
The Church Police head for a Roman Catholic school, where a kid has killed a priest with a Stanley knife and some pupils seems to be light-sensitive. The killer kid does a runner, goes home with a paedophile, is attacked by the bloke's dog and ends up in hospital. The Church Police have to find out how children at the school have been contaminated with the vampire disease without penetration.
The key is meningitis containing Code V, which had been passed on by another paedophile with UV-sensitive skin. Michael shoots the man concerned but he fails to shoot a vampire who still looks like a child. Meanwhile, Kirsty, Michael's dead mate's fiancée, loses touch with Jacob, the journalist. Jacob has been making himself notices and he is contacted by the vampires and infected. And Harman, the head of the Church Police, has cancer.
05. Terra Incognita
A man off a flight from Brazil is stopped at an airport because he is bleeding from the ears. The vampires have been at him, giving him artificial blood to cure his sickle-cell anaemia and biting him all over to taste their product. The man's sister wants to contact Dr. March – the husband of the lady doctor in the Church Police, who is supposed to have died 6 years before. Also on the flight are some coffins. The church police capture one of them and the vampire inside knows Dr. March's husband. 'John' turns out to be an ambassador with a message.
Meanwhile, Vaughan finds himself in a locked warehouse with four other coffins – all locked but with a clock counting down on a release mechanism. He escapes by dragging a coffin over to the door, making it open early and shooting the vampire so it explodes and blows a hole in the door. Michael goes to meet Kirsty but he is jumped on by bouncers while finding out if she has a reflection – she was chewed by the nosy journalist and she is probably a vampire, too.
06. Persona Non Grata
John, the vampire in custody, is getting stroppy and Kirsty is getting restless. The prisoner, also known as Paul Hoyle, was involved in the Chernobyl clean-up and he chose to become a vampire to avoid dying of cancer. Kirsty finds the journalist, Jacob, eating the security guard but she is still bent out of shape because Michael was ready to shoot her last week and Jabob tells her that Mike killed her fiancé, Jack. Jacob also tells Michael that the vampires want Robert March back so that he can develop synthetic blood for them.
Frances, Michael's sometime girlfriend, refuses to become involved in the trade of the tube containing March's ashes for Kirsty and dumps Mike. Then the Church Police pick her up and they shoot Hoyle to show her what happens when carbon-fibre bullets write off a vampire. The boss of the Church Police, Harman, isn't taking his cancer medicine and that makes Vaughan very suspicious, so he trashes Harman's office. In fact, everyone is suspicious of everyone else in this episode.
The vampires are out to create a nuclear winter and wipe out humans – which is why they need their artificial blood. Michael brings a tube to Jacob, the journalist, and Vaughan makes a bog of shooting Jacob – he doesn't have a round up the spout when he pulls the trigger! Some sniper! But it is Jack who is regenerated, not Robert March, and he is now at large.
End of the series.
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