Spoiler alert: this recap assumes you’ve seen the sixth episode of Blue Eyes on More4 or Walter Presents. Don’t read on if you haven’t.
Now, I’m not saying this is a huge problem, but I suddenly find myself responding very differently to the various interconnected worlds in Blue Eyes. The labyrinthine political mystery, with the added twist of some uranium mining deal that seems to necessitate a change to the constitution, is leaving me cold. Just sort it out, you crazy, corrupt politicos. But the visceral story of Mattias and Sofia, who are on the run from the police and last seen making love at dusk by a lake (how very Swedish!), is gripping.
At first the implication was that this would be a political thriller with Elin Hammar as the star. But poor old Elin, with her neat tops and perpetual frown, has been thoroughly upstaged by mad Mattias, the pin-up Nazi. He even gives us his revolutionary philosophy in this latest episode – the sixth of 10. “Capitalists have no solidarity with their own people. They’ve sold their soul to the Jews. When we eradicate capitalism, we will have an international community.” Blue Eyes has been careful not to identify Nazism exclusively with the right; it is sui generis, combining elements of left and right in one ferocious cocktail.
We also meet Mattias’s parents: filthy rich, complacent – even when the swat team arrives, his father can’t bring himself to get off the sofa or put his glass of whisky down – and doting on their boy, who it transpires has been a fascist sympathiser since his teens. Mattias’s Nazism seems to be the result of a loathing of his family’s ancestral wealth and excessive mother love.
Somehow, in another of the unexplained passages that punctuate the series, Mattias and Sofia escape from the swat team which has surrounded his parents’ house. Even when Sofia does a quick U-turn and screeches off in the opposite direction to avoid a roadblock, the police fail to give chase. Inspector Clouseau would have had a respectable career with the Swedish police.
Sofia and Mattias come across like a Nazi Bonnie and Clyde, and there is a danger that we will forget they are the bad guys and enjoy their lust for freedom – and for each other – instead. Even with the hard-to-dispose-of body of the murdered care home owner in the boot of their car – they eventually send the car to the crusher – they seem to be having all the fun.
As I asked previously, where is the moral centre of gravity here? Who ultimately are we meant to identify with in a society where everyone is pitching their own version of truth? Elin, presumably, but is she too detached? Things happen to her – you constantly expect her to stumble across another dead body, as when she gets back to her apartment and hears the sound of what may be an intruder – but she hasn’t initiated much yet. Sofia and Mattias have our attention, and it’s a short step from attention to sympathy.
The third strand in the story concerns the rightwing, anti-immigration Security party. (Clarification: early on, I called them the Assurance party, but the subtitles have been updated.) Things are not going well; their brand of nationalism is being lumped together with the Nazi violence preoccupying the public, and the increasingly puffy and put-upon Olle is having something close to a nervous breakdown. He is filmed by three youths as he harangues an innocent bystander in a shop queue, telling him that an inability to wait quietly in line is decidedly un-Swedish (Olle basically wants to go back to the Sweden of 1928). The video gets on the news, and the party bigwigs are not happy.
Olle’s steely minder Janina also discovers that he made off with party funds to give to Sofia, and, just when he thinks it can’t get any worse, he recognises Mattias as Sofia’s chum when Mattias’s face is plastered over the news in connection with the care home owner’s murder. Since he has given money to Sofia, doesn’t that make him the funder of a terrorist group? Potentially tricky for the justice spokesman of a party which takes a tough line on law and order. He wants to go to the police, but Janina advises against it. No wonder Olle has a migraine.
Sofia’s brother Simon, who gets a chilling visit from Veritas leader Gustav (“I would never hurt you, Simon, but take care of yourself”), is in the same boat. He knows who Mattias is, but dare he go to the police, thus condemning his sister? After all, as is dawning on him from pictures in a newspaper in which he can recognise her eyes through the slit in her terrorist balaclava, she fired the shot that killed the care home owner. (By the way, where is Sofia’s toddler Love while Bonnie and Clyde are speeding round the country in an open-top car, disposing of dead bodies and making out by the lake? Surely Sofia puts Love before mere sex.)
At least the sun shone in this episode and the body count didn’t increase. It felt as if we were taking stock. The PM sounded prime ministerial for the first time; Elin started to put the pieces of the conspiracy together (it seems lantern-jawed justice minister Gunnar is at the centre of it); the weedy environment minister continues to look as if he’s wandered in from a gardening programme; Max is back in favour; Mattias is exposed – in every sense; Sofia is oscillating between euphoria and despair; Simon may well be in mortal danger; and thanks to the squabble in the shop queue, poor Olle doesn’t get any pills for his headache. We may all need some paracetamol before this is done.
