Des episode 2, review: A rare true-crime drama just as invested in its victims as its killer

David Tennant plays serial killer Dennis Nilsen like a great seducer. Not in a romantic sense, of course –  there’s no sensual allure or aesthetic attractiveness (Nilsen looks uncannily like Mandark, the oily-haired scientist rival of Dexter’s Laboratory) – but in the fact he almost persuades you he’s someone worth listening to.

Episode two of ITV’s true-crime drama Des enriches the world outside of police station corridors and interrogation rooms, but Tennant remains the show’s lynchpin. As Nilsen, he slips in and out of compassion for his victims, but even then keeps them at an almost anthropological remove. His killing of an innumerable number of young men was a social statement, he insists. Or a kind of experiment in intimacy, propping bodies up on his living room sofa, stroking them and marvelling at them. He’s certainly not a rampant sadist, he argues.

His first claim carries more water. As he elaborates during an interaction with his too-invested biographer Brian Masters (Jason Watkins), Nilsen is correct that we tend to only care about society’s most lonely and vulnerable once they’ve died under tragic circumstances. Is Nilsen a killer with a point? A smart, fascinating psychopath deconstructing our social ills? But, as if a sigh of relief, the trance is soon broken.

If Des was at risk of becoming yet another true-crime drama far more emotionally invested in its central murderer than its victims, Luke Neal’s canny script for the second episode rapidly declares the show’s true intent.

We see the faces of Nilsen’s prey – pretty young men searching for purpose in the world and only encountering horror. We meet grieving parents and exes as they are told the probable ends of their missing loved ones, and the police higher-ups far more concerned with budget than they are justice. Des is fascinated by Nilsen, and has a goldmine in Tennant, but wants to drive home the resulting trauma of his actions, too.

While episode two of the series – Des’s concluding chapter airs tomorrow night – feels like a necessary bridge in some respects, it also never feels perfunctory. Daniel Mays is still reliably warm as the police detective investigating Nilsen, his slack-jawed dismay slowly replaced by wounded determination. Watkins is also proving to be just as slippery a presence as Tennant.

He is playing Masters as someone equally as detached as the man that fascinates him, his anthropological goals sound but whose process seems eerily devoid of empathy. He may, somewhat unexpectedly, be the most compelling of the show’s central trio. If Des wants its viewers to gradually recognise the weighty evil of Dennis Nilsen, where it stands on Masters is still a question mark.