Clique is like Pretty Little Liars, with a Jordan Peterson-style villain

It would be easy to dismiss Clique (Stan) as just another teen mystery melodrama in the style of Pretty Little Liars or Riverdale, but that would be to do it a slight disservice: while the Edinburgh-set series certainly looks to be cut from the same cloth as its American cousins, it has far grander ambitions, and mostly fulfils them.

Synnove Karlsen as Holly McStay in season 2 of Clique, a crime mystery drama series set in Edinburgh.Credit:Stan

That said, there's no doubt it does deliver the pulpish thrills the genre, and its core youngish audience, demands. The uniformly attractive cast hop from dancefloor to bedroom on a never-ending cycle of pills, booze and texting before popping in to the odd lecture and out to solve the odd crime.

But all that sexed-up Nancy Drew-style plotting is leavened with some serious stuff too, which is what makes it also engaging for an audience old enough to engage in the aforementioned activities without the aid of a fake ID.

At the centre of everything is Holly McStay (Synnove Karlsen), a second-year humanities student at Edinburgh University. We met her as a fresher in season one, an eager-beaver student in thrall to the macro-economics lecturer Jude McDermid (Louise Brealey), whose brand of feminism was all about individual agency rather than playing victim: use your assets to get ahead, and stop your whining.

Jude even put her money where her mouth is, providing internships for go-getter young women in her brother's private banking operation. Such a pity he turned out to be running a money-laundering and prostitution operation without her knowing it.

Cometh the new season cometh the new bogeyman. This time it's a Jordan Peterson-type figure called Ben Howard (Richard Gadd), a former university lecturer who now runs a website-cum-men's rights group called Twitcher, dedicated to countering what he claims is the liberal-feminist orthodoxy of the mainstream media.

Quite accurately, Holly characterises his office/bar/hangout as a "home to the little lost boys"; Ben's MO is to offer disaffected chaps a beer and a cause. Welcome to the incel cell.

Holly is dragged into this realm of toxic masculinity – which rapidly progresses from snowflake-baiting to out-and-out misogyny – by what else but the hots.

She falls for hunky Jack Yorke (Leo Suter), whose dubious politics aren't the only thing that put him at odds with his mother Agnes Reid (Madeleine Worrall), who is running for Parliament on a women's rights platform. He also suffers blackouts, and once stuck his foster brother Calum (Nicholas Nunn) with a knife, though he has no memory of it.

Richard Gadd as Ben Howard, a Jordan Peterson-esque figure.Credit:Stan

That of course makes him suspect number one in the assault on Holly's housemates Rayna (Imogen King) and Fraser (Stuart Campbell) after a beach party. Holly vacillates between trying to prove his innocence and expose his guilt, a conflict viewers of season one will be all-too familiar with.

If our heroine appears to lack a clear moral compass that's because (a) she's young and figuring it out, and (b) she's got some dark stuff in her past that makes her, well, a little more inclined to be able to see both sides of the coin of righteousness than your average 20-year-old.

In fact, it's ultimately that willingness to walk both sides of the street that makes Clique so much more interesting than its genre mates. Like many a young uni student, it's grappling with the big issues of the moment, falling first this way then that as each argument tantalises with the compelling power of its rhetoric.

University is a crucible in which young minds are moulded before setting hard, and in a sense that's the subject matter Clique is most interested in. And, this being a British drama, it can't help but overlay the genre conventions with just a tinge of social-realism.

The ‘lost boys’: Nicholas Nunn as Calum, Jyuddah Jaymes as Aubrey, Leo Suter as Jack and Barney Harris as Barney.Credit:Stan

If you haven't seen season one, you'll be able to navigate season two well enough. But it's certainly a richer experience if you understand Holly's back story, the relationships with her fellow interns – especially Louise (Sophia Brown) and Rachel (Rachel Hurd-Wood) – and the very dark secrets of her childhood.

And at just six episodes per season, it's a quick enough study that you could probably cram it all in a single all-nighter. In honour of your own student days, perhaps.

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