It’s a forced contrivance but nowhere near as strained as the final moments of the season. During a racially charged investigation, Wallander learns about-and struggles with-his daughter’s new boyfriend, a Syrian (and a handsome doctor, of course). Other attempts to shoehorn Wallander’s neurosis into the plotlines are less successful. Branagh’s fear seems overwhelming and recognizably human, like a man suffering from a trauma that will never go away. He seems genuinely scarred, and not in the sensitive-cum-macho way that quickly leads to the hero overcoming his fear and righting the world. It’s one of Branagh’s best moments, breaking into a flop sweat and removing his shirt before trying to handle his firearm. Later, in a subsequent episode, we see Wallander struggling to even hold a gun. In the first episode, titled “Faceless Killers,” Wallander is forced into a gunfight, the outcome of which scars him for the remainder of the season. His angst seems existential in nature, probably passed on by his father (a grizzled David Warner), an artist who, before he succumbed to senile dementia, spent his career painting 7,000 exact replicas of the same landscape.Īnother quirk of Wallander’s is his abhorrence of violence. He’s divorced, and there’s a grown daughter with whom he tries-and fails-to connect with, but these seem to be a product, not a cause, of his bad temper. There are no dead wives in his background, no botched cases where he let the young girl die in the well. One of the nice quirks of Wallander is that his particular brand of misery doesn’t stem from any one defining event. The screenplays (adapted by Richard Cottan) are sharply written, the cinematography and direction are top-notch, and the actors (all British, all using their real accents) are culled from the incredible pool of character actors that Great Britain churns out like scones and clotted cream. Each episode (there are three in season two) is built on a standard whodunit plot, fairly unmemorable but rendered well. A depressed, humorless policeman isn’t exactly an original conceit, and Wallander itself, besides its coldly beautiful settings, isn’t a particularly original show either. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve.Even under blue skies, the windswept fields and beaches of southern Sweden appear bleak and hopeless in the second season of Wallander, the British adaptation of Henning Mankell’s bestselling series of detective novels, currently airing on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery! And nothing looks more bleak and hopeless than Kurt Wallander himself, a morose, unhealthy homicide detective played (with no hint of his usual charm and eloquence) by a blindingly pale Kenneth Branagh. Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecuter who has peaked his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. And as if this didn’t present enough problems for the Ystad police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman’s last word is foreign, leaving the police the one tangible clue they have–and in the process, the match that could inflame Sweden’s already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments. It was a senselessly violent crime: on a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck. The mystery thriller series that inspired the Netflix crime drama Young Wallander.įrom the dean of Scandinavian noir, the first riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series.
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