Medina Plaza Hotel

Look, I don’t care what you might’ve been doing in the hotel room in your own time. Not gonna ask you anything about that. Won’t go there. Private stuff is private stuff.

You’ve got to hand it to the makers of this one – they knocked it out of the park on the visuals front. Having been there myself, I can confirm that Iceland will do that. We’re in Scotland in the story, though. I actually haven’t been that far up in the north of Scotland, but I’m reliably informed (by Scottish people and the internet) that there are equivalently spectacular (and frosty) landscapes up there anyway. Maybe they all just wanted to spend the equivalent of twenty quid in weird money on a pint or something.

The episode is pretty horrific and involves multiple harrowing murders, cover ups and, well, a heroic hamster. And it is chock full of logos of fictional companies, notably Fences Pizza, Realm Insurance and this, The Medina Plaza Hotel. These are all represented visually, but this was the most challenging, what with the all the feathery bits going on. I actually noticed the cover of a magazine called ‘Dwell‘ show up as well, but it turns out that that’s actually real. The show’s protagonist Mia is an architect, see. She’s staying in the hotel to attend the ‘Future Living Forum’. It’s an ethical thing, which is all at odds to what she ends up doing, so obviously deliberate.

It’s not particularly revered by fans, this one, though aforementioned spectacular views make up for it, as does chameleonic Geordie Andrea Riseborough’s turn as Mia, being a panicked and frantic Scouser constantly on the edge. Though she’s still with it enough to use pornography as an alibi when she’s disposing of her ex-boyfriend’s corpse. Which I thought was a touch of class.

I did toy with the idea of a place name for this one. You know, a specific branch of the Medina Plaza Hotel like what the Hiltons would do or whatever. The only place of note in the programme was ‘Larkinge’, which flashes up in the address of someone helping poor, soon-to-be-dead Shazia with her insurance enquiries. But it’s a made up place and doesn’t add a lot, so I left it off.

So there you go. It’s a hotel. A generic one. Probably in or near a plaza. Get one of these and you can pretend to be someone being paid fractionally above minimum wage to clean the toilets of debauched reprobates if you like.