The Bridge, series 4 finale, review: the Scandi drama has veered into absurdity, but there was still plenty to enjoy
Was this a Bridge too far? While the Swedish-Danish cooperating cops drama has spawned cross-border offspring all over the TV universe, it took two and a half years for the last Saga saga to materialise.
In the fourth series of The Bridge (BBC Two) everything changed that so it could stay the same. Malmö detective Saga Norén (Sofia Helin) went to hot-desk in Copenhagen. But as usual she was on the hunt for a serial killer with a grandiose taste in vengeful purges.
We should be used to the house style of showrunner Hans Rosenfeldt by now - he did something spookily similar with the recent Marcella on ITV. His detectives are put through the mincer via a mix of OTT soap operatics (Saga’s sister was murdered by her mother, while her Danish counterpart Henrik was forever searching for his long-lost daughters) and outright gothic horror (the severed head in the bouquet).
There was, however, a slight variation on the theme in this finale. Innocent-seeming lurker Susanne Winter (Sandra Yi Sencindiver) was outed as the avenging girlfriend of the sacrificial undercover cop Tommy. She coolly confessed to all those dastardly executions, plus a second failed attempt on the life of Saga (“It would have worked if it wasn’t for your damn vest!” was pure Scooby Doo).
But there were still 40 minutes to go and Henrik Sabroe (Thure Lindhardt) had yet to suffer. Cue some last-minute torture for him and daughter Astrid (Selma Modéer Wiking) courtesy of Brian/Kevin (Elliott Crosset Hove), who sprang somewhat expectedly out of his wheelchair. It does seem quite easy to acquire a gun in Denmark. Good job Saga held on to a house key.
This concluding plot threw everything into the pot, linking all and sundry to anyone and everyone: it was, as it were, a cat’s cradle of red herrings. Holding it all just about in balance was Saga. Helin has had the monstrous task of humanising her character with just a perma-frown, swivelling bug eyes and no smiles or conversational filter to work with.
To the last, the script slyly wanted to have its fun with her while offering glimpses of non-autistic redemption. If it never quite tallied, it might have looked way less plausible in English. Having cast her police badge into the Øresund, and had one last tumble with Henrik, who’s to say her next role won’t be motherhood after all?
I for one will miss her. I won’t miss the theme tune. After four series did anyone else get close to deciphering the lyrics of Hollow Talk by Choir of Young Believers, a noodly mulch of crooned vowels merely masquerading as English? Nor I will pine for Henrik’s grating goatee.
In this series, much of the fun was supplied by Lars (Mikael Birkkjær), the non-PC cop rumbled for selling police secrets to the media, perhaps to pay all his alimonies. Birkkjær holds a special place in Scandi drama’s Valhalla, having been Sarah Lund’s sidekick in The Killing, married to statsminister Birgitte Nyborg in Borgen and now boss to Saga Norén in The Bridge. Quite the hat-trick. Please can he have his own exported series?
