From the outset, Blue Eyes has been two dramas rolled into one: a political conspiracy reaching to the very top of the Swedish government, and the story of two lost souls – Sofia Nilsson and her brother Simon – who get dragged into a home-grown terrorist movement after the death of their mother. That’s a hugely ambitious undertaking and much of it has worked. But the problem is that, as the series has progressed, the conspiracy has become much less compelling than the Nilssons’ rite of passage.
That disparity was stark here. Sofia’s final scene with the psychopathic Mattias was chilling. She thought he had killed Simon and, as he lay recovering from an operation to remove a bullet from his stomach, she put a gun to his head. “Did you kill Simon?” Mattias says no, but tells her it was his brother who shot him. “He let us down,” says Mattias. “He let you down.” This gives Sofia pause for thought – and Mattias just enough time to grab the gun.
Now the roles are reversed. Mattias is holding the gun to Sofia’s head. So far, so cliched. But then comes the twist. Mattias starts a rant that demonstrates just how unhinged he is: “Why do you think we chose you – because you are special? We chose you because you’re obedient, Sofia. Like a little dog. People like you serve people like me.” Sofia, remember, had fallen in love with Mattias, enjoyed a tryst by the lake, believed in him, even in his perverted cause.
“Shoot me,” Sofia implores him. He doesn’t. “You’re a bloody coward,” she says. Now he does shoot her. Or tries to. Four times he pulls the trigger, but there are no bullets in the gun. Mattias is incredulous. He allows himself a little laugh at her deceit. Then she plunges a penknife into his recently stitched bullet wound. He winces. Round and round she twists it. What a satisfying sound it makes. This twisting lasts for maybe 20 seconds. All the time, they are looking into each other’s eyes, lovers’ eyes, loathers’ eyes.
This all feels felt and carefully wrought. By contrast, the labyrinthine political conspiracy feels paint-by-numbers, mechanical, tacked on. Some big corporation called Indal wants to start uranium mining in Sweden, with Uddevalla – the Nilssons’ home town – as the pilot site. The boss of the company, Erik Hilte, tells the prime minister to stop investigating Indal (whose agents, it seems, have already murdered Annika Nilsson and Sarah Farzin) or he will pull his funds out of Sweden and add to the simmering stock market crisis caused by the terrorist violence and the impending election.
The PM, who is not the upstanding chap I thought he was, accedes – the heavy-handed point is that real power lies with big business rather than politicians – and tells Gunnar and Elin to get off the case. “There are more important things than duty and morals,” the PM tells Gunnar. “There are consequences and impacts.”
I was wrong about Gunnar, too. He wants to carry on with the investigation, but the PM tells him he will lose his job as justice minister if he does. I was also wrong about Rebecka, the PM’s strategist (and also, we discover, lover – Swedish politics is a steamy business). She won’t hand over an incriminating report that apparently shows what Indal was up to in Uddevalla.
This is a bad move on Rebecka’s part because it leads to her being found by the PM in a bloodied heap at the bottom of a stairwell. This is ludicrous enough, but even more unbelievable is that Elin should then come along – she is looking for Rebecka, to warn her that things are hotting up over the report.
This is at least the third time Elin has found a still-warm corpse – she happened on Annika in the street and discovered Sarah’s dead body on a railway line. How much more does the poor girl have to take? She is starting to run out of reactions to each discovery – hand over mouth, rolling eyes, spot of retching. This scene does not feel felt in the way the Sofia-Mattias confrontation does. It feels like the writers are starting to tie up some complicated conspiratorial loose ends.
Gustav, the leader of terrorist group Veritas, discovers Mattias’s body, stretched out on a slab in an oddly Christ-like pose. He gently pulls down Mattias’s eyelids. Gustav evidently felt a kind of love for him. We learned earlier that they were comrades in the army. Who knows what any of this means?
I never had any real sense of who Gustav was. Mattias, the nihilistic son of smug, filthy-rich parents, had a recognisable inner demon; he enjoyed killing people, took pleasure in terror. But Gustav – ideologue, organiser, would-be revolutionary – was an enigma, a plot device rather than a fully fledged human being.
The police put out photographs of Gustav – he was captured on camera in the attack on the Swedish Stock Exchange. His grandfather recognises him and goes to the police, patiently sitting and waiting to tell them his story, then struggling to say: “I know him ... he is my grandson.” It is nicely done. Blue Eyes is good at the quiet moments that punctuate the mayhem.
Simon sends kidnap victim Nils, whose photograph is also all over the papers, into a randomly chosen school to tell a teacher who he is by pointing to his own image on the front page. It is another sweet moment. Nils doesn’t want to leave Simon’s side, but Simon tells him he must be brave. He toddles over to the teacher as Simon makes himself scarce. Nils still thinks his father is alive. Simon has been his surrogate.
Simon and Love, Sofia’s son, are back in Uddevalla, and break into their old family home – up for sale since Annika’s death. All we care about now is whether they survive; what happens to Sofia (who took part in a terrorist atrocity and can’t be allowed to get off scot-free); and who has the pleasure of killing off Gustav. Or perhaps he will be allowed to live, like the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, on whom he is surely modelled. Some monsters should be kept alive as reminders of their hideous crimes, exhibits in a museum of horrors.
