BAPTISTE BOWS OUT
In what’s likely to be his final series, the French detective hits rock bottom as he searches for a diplomat’s missing family
Unkempt, wild-eyed and the worse for wear, the normally unruffled Julien Baptiste is a very different creature when we meet him for his fourth and final outing. The indefatigable detective is a huge hit after his scene-stealing performances in two series of The Missing, followed by his spin-off Baptiste. But sadly the screenwriting brothers Jack and Harry Williams have said this will be the last series.
Baptiste takes us to even darker places than ever before. As usual the six-part series tells the story — this time about the missing family of a British diplomat — in two timelines. The first time we see Baptiste he’s drunkenly pounding on a door before being arrested. This is in the present, and it will be several episodes before we discover why. ‘He’s hit the bottom of the barrel, and a lot of bottles,’ says Tchéky Karyo, who takes the lead role. ‘But it was exciting to play — he’s at a moment where everything is shaken. He’s being a masochist with himself and he’s so blind and selfish that he doesn’t realise the pain he’s creating around himself.’
All we know is that it’s connected to a case he was working on 14 months earlier where he was trying to find the family of Emma Chambers, the British ambassador to Hungary. Played by Killing Eve’s Fiona Shaw, Emma was on holiday with her husband and two teenage sons when they went missing.
The police hunt draws a blank, and that’s when Baptiste offers to help. ‘I loved the dynamic of Emma and Baptiste,’ says Fiona. ‘It’s not romantic, their partnership is something else entirely. This series is about the details of life and how something can explode those details and you discover the person you really are.
‘Emma’s had this terrible thing happen and the writing shows grief in many facets. I was moving backwards and forwards with this ongoing sorrow, while for Baptiste the story is as much about failure as it is grief.’ Baptiste is already in a bad way when he offers to help Emma — in the last series he discovered he had a son, who’s now a criminal. He sees what’s happened to Emma on TV and he identifies with her so says, “I can help, I’m good at that,”’ says Tchéky. ‘He’s at a point where he can’t see any light.
‘But I think what people like about Baptiste is something we’ve seen with him before — even in the worst situation if you accept how wounded and weak you are, you can become really strong and rebuild yourself.’
–Nicole Lampert Baptiste, today, 9pm, BBC1.