How many rules of the crime show genre can one series flout and still make for riveting television? The serial-killer drama The Fall aims to find out.
The second season unfolded as if it had never heard the phrase “hurry up,” closely tracking a serial killer who was no longer killing, a police department that makes no mistakes and a narrative that contained no red herrings. Like its two central characters, The Fall is a control freak, aggressively policing its own thrills.
The first season concluded with the Belfast Strangler, Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan), his identity still unknown to the police, calling the woman in charge of the investigation to tell her she would never catch him because he was leaving town.
But that woman, Superintendent Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson), remained certain that the Strangler would return, certain that he’s a murder addict and certain he wouldn’t be able to stop. Her instincts align with the demands of television, and Paul does indeed head back to Belfast, where he again begins to act out the early stages of his grotesque fantasies.
Paul and Stella are engaged in a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game, but the roles of cat and mouse reverse from time to time.
As killer and cop, Paul and Stella are two of the most icily even-keeled versions of these archetypes ever put on screen. Both present nearly unruffable exteriors, but anger bubbles beneath their surfaces.
Paul is compulsive, practised, and methodical: he studies his victims, hunting them over a period of time, then slowly strangles them and poses their bodies in his own sick pornography.
Dornan’s role in 50 Shades of Grey as a dominating lust object inaugurating a virgin into the thrills of S&M adds a new frisson to The Fall. The series is unambiguous about Paul’s monstrosity, but it is easy to imagine scenes and images from the show that illustrate said monstrosity being remixed by 50 Shades fans into little more than proof of hotness.
A scene of a shirtless Paul video-conferencing with a 16-year-old girl he is brainwashing, for example, seems bound to be re-contextualised as a “damn, he’s sexy” GIF. It’s easy, in fact, to imagine certain characters in The Fall making that very GIF.
The second season goes out of its way to explore the uneasy ripple effect of Paul’s good looks. Early on, a fairly accurate crime sketch of him is published in the newspaper. A woman holding the paper takes a seat across from Paul on a train – in part because she has noticed how handsome he is –and he asks her if he looks like the man in the drawing.
She concedes that he does, yet never considers that he could actually be that man. She goes so far as to tell him that she’s actually a brunette who dyed her hair blonde to avoid the Belfast Strangler and to show him her driver’s licence, complete with address, to prove it. Paul is essentially too good-looking for people to consider or care that he is a threat.
Stella is not immune to the appeal of good looks either, but is also aware of the additional power Paul’s appearance gives him. In Stella, Paul has met his match.
She, too, is compulsive, practised, and methodical. She, and the police working for her, rarely make mistakes. The bureaucratic cock-up, such a feature of murder mysteries, rarely appears on The Fall. Slowly but surely she and her staff encircle Paul. He may be a genius serial killer, but at some point, the unlimited resources of a well-trained police department can overpower even a superman-in-his-own-mind.
Anderson’s self-possessed hauteur serves the series well. The Fall follows its familiar premise – the ritual murder of young women – to a conclusion that is simultaneously logical and rare in the many other series about this same subject: that the battle of the sexes is real, you can tell because of the casualties, and it is a rout.
The series showcases a parade of men who abuse their physical superiority. Stella has to deliver a variety of sweeping lines noting this phenomenon. Telling a male police officer that Paul Spector is not, in fact, an aberration but a man on the continuum of men, who like all men is capable of crossing certain lines with women, takes real ovaries. – Slate
• The Fall, Tuesday, M-Net Edge, 8pm.