DVD Review: Intelligence - Season Two

When we last left Jimmy Reardon (Ian Tracey), at the end of the first season of Intelligence, the Vancouver drug boss and family man was in a bit of a pickle. Standing in the middle of a Seattle roadhouse with a disabled gun, surrounded by American DEA agents, his wife and daughter taken into custody, our anti-hero was definitely not in a happy place. Fortunately for the second season, James escapes this carefully constructed ambush, it does however take him about four episodes to return to business as usual following the incident though. First, of course, there's the tiny matter of getting smuggled back into Canada and keeping the Americans from extraditing him on a pair of trumped-up murder charges.

While Jimmy struggles to get back to business at the Chickadee Club, his handler and counterpart in the law enforcement community Mary Spalding (Klea Scott) has her own worries. Promoted to head the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, the ambitious policewoman finds the politics of her new position even more treacherous than undercover drug work. Both our leads face dangerous incursions from American interlopers: for Jimmy, it's American drug dealers eager to wrest the Vancouver pot selling market from the Canadians; for Mary, it's a shady financial group evocatively named Blackmire that is working to eradicate the U.S./Canada border for its own duplicitous ends.

The plotlines merge as Jimmy, in his ongoing efforts to "go legit," becomes involved in an offshore banking set-up that the Blackmire Group is utilizing for money laundering. The imperialistic American drug dealers turn out to have connections to the CIA, while the primary player in Blackmire, George Browne, none-too-coincidentally also happens to be a "retired CIA agent." To learn more about the Group, Mary recruits an escort named Julianna (Pascale Hutton) to cozy up to Browne. Unfortunately, Julianna proves to be far less stable as an informant than Jimmy. Both Mary and her new second-in-command Martin (Eugene Lipinski) are forced to baby and manipulate the émigré informant — as they also try to shield her identity from the way-too-curious American agents.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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