I watched Astrid series 4 and 5, as they followed Patience series 1 and 2 in E4's schedules. It's always been Wed and Thu in Jan for Patience, so over in three weeks.
I checked the episode guides, and I can't match up episodes or cases. I think Patience has quickly diverged from Astrid in the perosnal story of each character, as well as cases. For eample, you can see that in that Astrid only gets seriously romantically involved in series 5, while Patience is there in series 2. Yet, there is borrowing. For example, the speed-dating. Afterwards, both characters bump their heads on the table bewailing "why do peole do this to themselves!". The overriding commonality seems to be why Astird and Patience are orphaned, and can't remeber their childhoods.
I think the writer (Matt Baker) has different ideas he wanted to explore, and I think Ella Maisy Purvis has a strong enough intellect that she drives some of the differences too.
Something I noticed, I wonder if anyone else did: there seem to be glaring errors that are just too obvious to be down to accidents or ignorance. A really big one is that Patience has been left a puzzle box by her mother. A yellow Post-It note bears a 5 digit number - a clue. In one episide of series 2, Patience excitedly reveals she recognises the number as a mathematical curiosity: a "vampire number", which is the product of two numbers that have the same digits as the resultant product. There's a Wikipedia page on them. Trouble is, vampire numbers must always have an even number of digits.
Okay, continental (Belgian) electrical sockets in a supposed English country house, and a bus that drives there on the right are production issues. But plot holes?
I think these sorts of errors are deliberate and I wonder if the show's producers are doing it because they know that autists often spot mistakes like that and like to point them out and explain why. Is that like giving us Easter eggs?
Precontemplative.
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Precontemplative.