Dornan stars as a traveler in Australia who is run off the road deliberately by an 18-wheeler, causing his car to flip and him to be badly injured. When he wakes up in the hospital it's to find that, due to head trauma, he has amnesia and can't remember anything, including his name. Macdonald is Probationary Constable Helen Chambers, a rookie cop sent to the hospital to make a report about the accident. She feels sympathy for the attractive amnesiac; I often wonder how much help the people at the center of these sorts of plots would get if they looked like say, Jackie Gleason instead of Jamie Dornan.
The odd characters are a distraction; The Tourist seems to be trying for a Fargo vibe, where every character has weird personality quirks or funny eccentricities, except they're Australian, not from the American mid-west. In fact, a lot of elements in The Tourist seem lifted from other- better- movies/shows. An amnesiac with skills he can't explain who's being chased by killers- Jason Bourne. Car chases through great expanses of the Australian outback- Road Warrior. A baddie with a constantly changing story about a part of his back story- The Dark Knight.
In the final episode, Elliot decides that he can't live with what he's found out about himself. Alone in his hotel room, he ODs on pills and booze and then calls Helen, wanting to hear her voice as he fades out. This is where the show ends, and we're supposed to be wondering if he actually dies, or if Helen calls the EMTs in and he ends up getting his stomach pumped, or what. Mostly though, I was just wondering how he paid for a hotel room, pills, and a bottle of booze. Which is probably a good sign that I wasn't very invested in this story or its characters. In any case, I think we can safely say that he doesn't die because it was recently announced that there's going to be a second series.