Spoiler alert: this recap assumes you’ve seen the fourth episode of Blue Eyes on More4 or Walter Presents. Don’t read on if you haven’t.
I’m engaged by Blue Eyes, but it is testing my suspension of disbelief. Why is poor old Elin always on hand just in time to find a bloodied body: in this case Sarah, finally unearthed, briefly on the point of blurting out something significant, but five minutes later dead on a railway line? And how come Sofia and Simon have just packed a few things and headed for Stockholm, with nowhere to go and before selling their little house in Uddevalla? What rational person behaves like that?
Perhaps reason is too much to hope for. With the election approaching and victims of a) the neo-Nazis at Veritas and b) a political conspiracy at the heart of the Swedish government mounting, these are irrational times. It makes even the revelations in the Panama Papers and the UK culture secretary’s romantic entanglements look tame.
Episode four of Blue Eyes was definitely an in-the-shade one: there was barely a hint of daylight, though it must be said that Stockholm looked rather beautiful in the neon-lit night. When Sofia and Simon drove away from wet, grey, flat Uddevalla for their hoped-for new life in the capital, I could see why they were keen to get out. Though having deranged neo-Nazi murderer Mattias, who is smitten with Sofia, driving close behind does not bode well. And what has he done to Sofia’s drunken former partner Andreas, who we see Mattias waiting for with a glint in those crazy blue (!) eyes. Frankly, I fear the worst given the high attrition rate in Uddevalla.
Elin, not surprisingly since she keeps finding dead bodies, is having a bit of a breakdown, crying, tugging at her hair and gulping down pills. At least she seems to have got wise to Max, her innocuous-looking co-worker in the justice department, who is clearly responsible for Sarah’s death and may – this is a wild guess on my part – be the link between the neo-Nazis and a faction that has penetrated government looking to assist the rightwing cause. Sarah, before her murder, hinted to Elin at an attempt to amend the constitution, even change the form of government. At some point the worlds of political violence and political intrigue are going to collide.
It is one of the oddities of the series that the really bad guys are given the moments of tenderness. Mattias and Sofia, bonding over a rightwing rampage, are clearly in love, with the latter even willing to kill to prove her commitment; Mattias stops her in the nick of time (another dramatic but implausible scene), suggesting she may yet be redeemed.
Sofia herself is hard-working, independent, loves her son and her brother – admirable in every way if you ignore her dislike of immigrants, who she blames for her mother’s murder. (Which reminds me: who did it? My guess is a rightwing agent provocateur.)
Even Gustav, the leader of Veritas (beware men with beards in this series), is shown visiting his dying father in hospital. “I’m going to make you proud of me,” Gustav says. “I’m already proud of you,” replies Dad. Monsters have feelings, too, seems to be the message. In fact, maybe they feel too much. Wasn’t Hitler always welling up during the most ecstatic passages in Wagner operas?
Where is the centre of gravity here? Who do we identify with? Who should we? I like the hangdog Olle, justice spokesman of the Assurance party (rightists but not of the murdering kind). I’m hoping he will have some sort of Damascene conversion and renounce his views, because at least he’s a human being, motivated by a love of Sweden rather than a loathing of immigrants. There is a qualitative difference; at least I think there is.
Sofia and her brother Simon are the other characters that could help root us, both dramatically and morally. More and more they resemble children adrift in a world they don’t understand, pressurised by Olle and now Mattias to join their causes. First they are orphaned; now they leave the family home with all its grim associations and head off on their dangerous adventure, drawn into the seductive, hallucinatory darkness of Stockholm.
As for the election itself, it goes on – a little pointlessly. We are shown snatches of what looks like a phenomenally dull TV debate between the eight party leaders, and for the first time we see the leader of the Assurance party, Peter Westman. After the big build-up he is a sad disappointment, a nonentity with slicked-back hair.
The series suggests an emptiness – worse, a calculating, conspiratorial emptiness – at the heart of Swedish political life, and, as we know from Weimar Germany and elsewhere, ideologues like nothing better than a void. Blue Eyes is a drama, but it is also a history lesson.
