After a big cop out, telly’s dishiest serial killer is back on the prowl
When it finished last year fans were up in arms at the ‘ cop out’ finale which, rather than tying up any loose ends, instead just neatly paved the way for a second series.
Last night The Fall ( BBC2) returned to our screens with Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) still on the hunt for a serial killer, still dressed like a catwalk model and still with a perfect blow-dry.
The man she was pursuing was Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan), the best looking murderer to ever stalk the streets of Belfast — or any other city come to that.
The original series became BBC2’s most successful drama for eight years but also attracted fierce criticism for glamorising brutal crimes against women. Particularly distasteful were lingering shots of the killer artfully posing the bodies of those he’d just slain.
Last night’s episode began with Spector’s l ast vi ctim having regained consciousness but, due to her trauma, she could not remember any details of her attack. Meanwhile, Spector, his marriage in trouble and the net closing in, had been laying low at a hideout in Scotland.
Unable to resist the allure of Belfast, he returned to silence his child’s teenage babysitter, who appears to be a lot closer to solving the case than Gibson, and to attack a former girlfriend who has been helping the police.
While the opener was tame in comparison with the first series, it’s clear the violence will be cranked up next week.
The key to the success of The Fall is in the two main characters. Spector has very little dialogue to work with and it’s a credit to Dornan’s acting skills that he’s able to make your flesh crawl by saying very little.
But the show is very much Gillian Anderson’s vehicle. She looks like an angel, talks like the Queen but is an outsider with a dark and troubling past. That she can make you feel protective towards her one minute and want to shake her the next is testament to Anderson’s talent.
Given that it’s been 18 months since The Fall was last on our screens it did rely too heavily on viewers having a particularly good memory for detail and some scenes were laughably implausible. A city living in terror of a serial killer but no one locks their doors at night?
Yet, despite flaws, The Fall already has me itching for next week’s instalment. Whether the drama and tension sustains for a further five episodes without resorting to cliché or — yet again — copping out on the viewer remains to be seen.
You could draw a lot similarities between Stella Gibson and Liz Garvey, the lead character from last night’s Babylon (C4). Just as icy, disturbed and disliked she was the sometimes brilliant, sometimes clueless spin doctor bought in to do a PR job on London’s beleaguered police force.
Babylon launched with a featurelength pilot back in February that received mixed reviews. The first episode of the series, sadly, took a massive step backwards. The plot focused on a riot at a young offenders’ institute that a private security firm had been given the job of policing.
It was a golden opportunity for Garvey and her team to use the event to their advantage by stepping in to save the day and highlight the failure of private policing contracts.
Scenes showing police and home Office bigwigs debating whether they should class the trouble as ‘ a disturbance’ or ‘a riot’ were amusingly convincing.
Less credible was the endless, combative, smarty-pants, quickfire dialogue between the police commissioner (James nesbitt) and Garvey (Britt Marlin). The writers did a great job of writing some killer lines — they just didn’t suit the people who said them.
The biggest problem was that none of the characters was engaging enough to make you care about them — from the chief all the way down to the dimwit new recruit. In the end it all smacked of being the TV equivalent of the Sinclair C5. Seemed a good i dea and really should have worked but just didn’t.