User Reviews

Wonderful Nordic Noir SPOILER ALERT: I am so glad I stumbled across this listing. Although some minor details of the plot did not make sense, this is an outstanding series. The characters are finely drawn and compelling. The intersection of ego, corruption, justice, and police work was well done. I loved that many of the actors- young and old- fully inhabited their character's lives. I especially like that the main characters were often not so young and decidedly unglamorous. Some of the details were gruesome but underplayed (fortunately). This is supposedly based on a true story and I plan to see what the basis might be. The way mental illness was portrayed was true-to-life, unsentimental , and avoided hysterics. For all of us- as Faulkner said- "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Lots of filler w/detectives personal lives & problems. Not too believable for tough seasoned cops. The usual conflict w/superiors. Couldn't quite figure out how one, probably mentally unstable, person can claim to have committed so many murders & be able to fool an entire police force w/all their resources & experience. Oddly, either because of cost or not up to the task, none of the tortures/killings were shown. Oh well!

Is the swedish police really that incompetent? A guy with psychotic problems is head of a department? An alcoholic, a bureaucrat and a guy that has no interest in the job are his team? Really? Of course they solve everything with an ease that is just creepy lol, i liked most of the female characters, they did a good job with the little they had to go on, swedish women seem to have come a long way but their men not so much, the psycho cop has a daughter that lives with him? Really? The killer has his reasons, i think they spent 2 lines on it, and as in so many series they are all interconnected, they all had the same psychiatrist, the killer, the psycho cop, the once thought killer, and she is friends with all the guys that put away the once thought killer, i hoped she was going to be the serial killer, using her patients as shields or so but no she is just as almost all of them really incompetent and full of herself, i think they tried to make the real killer human but without giving him a real context, bits and pieces only, i kinda liked the atmosphere, like with the snowman so i kept watching but is that enough to recommand it?

Where did it all go wrong, and why?

Season One was a gem: terrific acting, decent noir plot, and most of all fantastic characters, brilliantly written with subtle, quirky tells and foibles, way better than most Nordic crime posturing. So good in fact that when I saw Season Two dropped online, I went back after three years and watched it with my partner, who also loved it, so that we could enjoy Season Two together. If anything, Season One was even better the second time. Despite a relatively linear narrative about Police ineptitude/corruption in yet another serial killer investigation, the show was as good as I remembered.

Then came Season Two.

To say that Season Two is shorter than Season One by three episodes is to seem to challenge the laws of science. However they've managed it, the flat and lifeless writing, the bored, vacant acting (from the same core team of actors I was praising only days ago!), the massive holes and inconsistencies and improbabilities/coincidences in the plot all contrive to make it seem multiple times longer. Plots where the Police Commissioner has a 'dirty little secret' are sadly a dime a dozen. Instead of coming up with something better and more original, the writer(s) of Season Two attempt to distinguish their perverted Top Cop by making him so grossly stupid, inept, unrepentant and overt in his pedophile activities that he takes teen girls to hotels for torture and whatever else turns him on, not only in full daylight and wearing his Police uniform, but still on office hours and, get this, using his own personal credit card to pay at the desk. Not once, either, but, we're told, with hundreds of girls! And NO ONE has ever noticed? Not even the kindly receptionist who is at pains to explain he thought the elderly man who just checked in was accompanied by his (clearly badly beaten, bruised and scarred) daughter. As you would. Oh, and the Commissioner keeps a bag of torture devices - chains, handcuffs, dildoes and what look like chisels in his HQ office, apparently. I suppose he has to: having that many liaisons with prostitutes and teenage hikers during office hours wouldn't leave him much time to pop home for them.

At one point during this execrable garbage, my partner and I wondered if the cast of Season Two had not themselves been tortured and contractually forced into 'acting' out these dumbest five episode of anything we've seen in years. How else to explain it? The pandemic? Nordic melancholy? Some existential crisis in Swedish noir TV. Whatever, it would have made for better viewing than this paper-thin, regurgitated, box-ticking exercise in which the identity of 'the baddie' is so obvious from the first episode than they could have ended it there - and it would still have felt too long.