The Bridge, series 4 episode 1 review – long-awaited Scandi-noir drama made a particularly gruesome return
It was so perfectly set up. At the end of series three of The Bridge, as Mälmo detective Saga Norén (Sofia Helin) and Copenhagen cop Henrik Sabroe (Thure Lindhardt) stood facing each other, separated only by a speeding train, the narrative track to series four seemed clear.
Saga had been suspended, under suspicion of her terrifying mother’s murder but was, as far we knew, innocent; Henrik had quit his job after the skeleton of his long-missing wife had been found, and after admitting to Saga that he used drugs.
Perfect. They could spend the final 10 episodes of this Scandi crime marvel clearing Saga’s name, while digging around in a six-year-old cold case to find Henrik’s missing daughters. Pull up a chair. I can’t wait.
Cut to the first two actual sequences of series four: Saga in prison; and a very nasty scene of a woman buried up to her chest, mouth taped up with silver insulation tape (The Bridge’s producers must have bought a job lot of that stuff) being stoned by a gloved assailant. “The paramedics said she didn’t die immediately, it took up to 100 blows.” Hateful. Where’s the remote?
Of course, the previous season had taken the baroque serial killer genre to its logical conclusion: giving us not just stylised murder scenes, but full-blown art installations. The severed hand with the finger pointing to the next killing vied with the pair of dangling eyeballs on a Christmas tree to push the show closest to self-parody. It also teetered dangerously close to using Saga’s hinted-at Asperger’s for comic effect. Series four, it seems, is going to be the show’s post-concept-album return to its dirty rock ’n’ roll roots.
So it was that the stoning took place under the Oresund Bridge that gives the series its name. The victim was also a high-profile politician, the Head of Immigration, who had been linked to the “Champagne Scandal”, in which case workers were seen celebrating a successful bid to deport a gay Iranian man, who promptly disappeared. The Bridge doesn’t need much excuse to get stuck into issues of wider political significance, and the exercise of power, so we can expect it to get very knotty before long.
The twin brothers were a neat touch: one a high-profile journalist; the other having a habit of posing as his brother to tempt women into bed. There was also an ugly domestic stalker plot brewing. But inevitably the focus pooled around Saga and Henrik.
It was quite a feat for the hit Danish/Swedish co-production to establish this pairing in series three. In the first two series, Saga had been yoked to Kim Bodnia’s flawed Danish homicide cop Martin Rohde – surely one of the great detective duos – but Bodnia insisted that any attempt to circumvent the ending of series two, when Saga informed on him, would ruin the show.
Yet Henrik and Saga’s relationship proved to be a compelling one. Both detail freaks, they clearly admired each other’s abilities. The first time they had casual sex, the apparitions of Henrik’s wife and children disappeared. Here his children were back, demanding to know if he is going to stop looking for them.
Saga, meanwhile, was not making friends in jail, and as the action moved towards its unexpected violent climax, it seemed that that cold case could be back on the table. After it, all bets were off.
The final series of this classic Nordic Noir is going to have to work hard to match its predecessors. This far, it's not quite there.
