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Cape Town – Hlubi Mboya is bursting back on television on Wednesday night in the new local drama series, The Docket, on SABC3 at 21:30 in which the actress, known for her iconic role as Nandipha in Isidingo, leads an elite, fictional crime-fighting unit called The Ravens as the only woman in a high-stakes, high-adrenalin team.
The 13-episode series from Clive Morris Productions, created by producer Helen Smit, revolves around Colonel Ntsiki Motshe (Hlubi Mboya), leading a fictional South African high-profile crime fighting unit, trying to solve cases CSI-style that are loosely inspired by real-life, high-profile South African crime stories.
While the squad members have been chosen for their outstanding investigation skills, they’re also battling the glare of the media eye, with Motshe who has to try and deflect, answer and come up with quotes while everything happening behind-the-scenes is often very different from what is being presented to the media.
REAL LIFE INSPIRATION
The first episode is loosely inspired by the shock-hijacking and murder of the reggae star Lucky Dube in 2007 that made international headlines, with Sean Robert Daniels as head writer of the series. The series and first episode starts a year after the formation of The Ravens, and they’re investigating the case of famous musician Kgosi who is murdered.
Besides the stress of the work, the harrowing cases and crime-solving that veer into unexpected territory and resulting in unbelievable plot twists, gender dynamics also come to the front since Hlubi Mboya’s character is the only woman in a male-dominated team – where she is also the boss.
Part of the team are Colonel Marlon van Wyk (Duncan Johnson), Brigadier Funani Twala (Seputla Sebogodi), detective Terry Jahib (Ashish Gangapersad) and detective Neil Hall (Brendon Engelbrecht). Can The Ravens catch the perpetrators of crime without causing PR nightmares? Can South Africans from literally all walks of life, flung together under dangerous circumstances, work together to solve sensitive crime cases?
Cases range from a farm attack to campus rape, a possible cannibal chef, a named business man run over in the street, an “alien abduction”, an old man abducted from a nursing home, fossil theft, a judge murdered in a hotel room and bank robberies.
Throughout the first season and beyond the case of the week, there is also an overall mystery The Ravens are trying to solve – the Endless: An enigmatic serial killer that even starts to threaten the team members of The Ravens as they keep getting closer and closer to possibly unmasking and catching him.
WATCH A TEASER HERE:
