The icy waters of corporate fraud defrosted further still this week and, in the process, had me genuinely gripped. We got to see Nicky in full Drive mode, Sander descend to ever more evil depths, and Beardy finally get a shot on target.
But what really did the trick was the characterisation – I warmed to characters who, until now, had annoyed far more than charmed. Plus it upped the creep factor: Beardy did a shiveringly good job of acting the congenial customer at Jan’s garage to track down Nicky, and was distractingly sweet with Batista (“aren’t you a nice doggy!”). These flashes of geniality were set off by sinister moments such as when, having just shot addict Andreas to save the terrible twosome’s skins (and thereby make them beholden to him), he just happened to have the right stuff in his car boot to clean up the splattered blood and brain. A sure sign of a life cruelly lived.
Even hapless Bimse – the Seth Rogan to Nicky’s Ryan Gosling – became a sympathetic character. Who wouldn’t feel sorry for him when he slipped and glimpsed the face of his dead childhood friend Andreas as he carried his corpse? Or as he watched the barrel containing the body, the gun, and other presumably corrosive potions (or cement?) Beardy just happened to be carrying around, descend into the water. Yes, it was stupid to rescue the dog from Andreas’ skanky flat after he’d been shot trying to steal money from them, but when that tail wagged, who could blame him? Not even Nicky, who failed (in a brilliantly tense scene) to shoot the dog, could. It seems likely this will come back to bite them.
Even maddening Mads warmed the cockles. I liked one below-the-liner’s suggestion that the programme-makers have done a brave and original thing by making Mads’ whole point that “he’s a bit of a dick who no one really wants around”. And, while there’s definitely truth in that, he became someone I started to feel some affection for, almost despite myself.
Who could fail to pity him when he was told, bluntly, that there was no way he could afford a flat and to keep the house for his sick wife to live in? Just one look into those vacant meerkat-like eyes and you’d be trying to restructure some kind of mortgage, surely? His guffaw when his wife told him she’d had a fight with her doctor boyfriend was humanising – and there were touching moments like when, despite all she’s done to him, he tucked Kristina up in a blanket.
Alf and Mads’ dynamic continued to develop too. They had a strange and awkward little celebration in the car outside the bistro after hearing Claudia’s admission of what a mess Energreen is in. And the scene where Alf acted coy about Mads’ request to officially move into his house was strangely grin-inducing. As was Alf’s teasing Mads about their encounter with Cecilie – this was a favourite scene, for sure; who knew you could flirt over chat about warrants and wiretaps?
Where last week there was a corporate clock ticking on Energreen going public, this week opened with them doing just that. Their stock rose rapidly and even as Alf was saying “sod it, let’s open that second bottle of pinot blanc”, they’d hit 5,000 shareholders, which apparently protects them from the fraud gang, though I’m unclear why. The timebomb element came instead from politics – the Minister of Justice (played by Lotte Andersen … did anyone else clock it’s Bodil from The Bridge season two?) has cuts to make and unless fraud squad boss Nanna serves her up something good soon, their shoestring budget is going to be tightened further.
So Mads did what he does best – stopped following the money and started following the kinds of scents he used to when he was a traditional crime detective. And so he finds, via old colleague Jon, that Beardy has been captured on CCTV footage from a scrap yard where he dumped the car he used to run over Mia. How long can he continue to lurk under the radar of the fraud squad?
And whereas last week we were left wondering whether Jens Kristian would be able to save Claudia, this week his attempts to save her left him the one up shit creek with no proof that he didn’t sell information about Energreen to his old boss at Sturm Tech, or that the bank account in the Cayman islands where someone deposited €2m isn’t his. Well played, Beardy, who had Nicky and Bimse plant the incriminating files in his flat.
And all this despite Jens Kristian repeatedly trying to save Claudia’s skin – in the bistro when, sweatily downing whisky, he tries to preempt her “Energreen is one big scam” comments because he’s wearing a wire. And again when he tries to strike a deal with Mads to shield her from prosecution if he can serve up evidence of Sander’s guilt. He even goes so far as to fill her in and try to get her help to prove that Sander knows about all his company’s wheelings, dealings, shell companies and mammoth deficits.
It dawned on me only a little quicker than it did on Jens Kristian himself that his major crush, Claudia, had used his confiding in her that the fraud squad were on to Energreen against him. As a lawyer herself, she obviously knew that the recording of Jens Kristian getting Sander to sign something incriminating would undermine him as a witness, and therefore jeopardise the whole case. The scene in the lobby where Claudia, in her official capacity as Head of Legal not as his long-time friend, had security remove him was hard to watch, but mesmerising too.
It was relatively easy to have sympathy for Claudia when she was trying to get out of Sander’s snare. He has hooked her in with a cleverly creeping process – bonuses, shares and an inability to deny knowledge of wrongdoing – but it is less clever now. Having agreed to wait a month before moving to Paris to be with her son, Bertram, and help Sander clean up in the meantime, I hadn’t envisaged that cleaning up would mean getting a whole lot dirtier first. How could she throw Jens Kristian to the wolves like that? Now it’s only for poor Bertram’s sake that I hope she dodges prison – never has a child been dragged to more inappropriate work situations, stock exchanges and offices with murderous men. No wonder he was so thrilled by such a simple thing as a school uniform.
Of course, not all the sympathetic characters can come out unscathed, so I fear we might not see Nicky, Bimse and Claudia all alive and unincarcerated by the end of next week. Time will tell too whether we’ll see Sander get his comeuppance and Ulrik, roped back in after his stock exchange meltdown, come a cropper. Let’s hope someone can find some proof of what a slippery sardine Sander is.
Thoughts and observations
For anyone hot under the collar after watching Nicky and Lina’s post-fight make-up sex among the oily rags and winches in the garage, here you go.
Is that the last we’ll see of Tobias? Was Claudia truly just using him, and he her, or was there a real flame there?
Is Sander truly into Claudia, does he really wish they had “met somewhere else. In a different way” or is he just trying to suck her in further?
The use of glass in this show is very clever. I like that Ulrik and Sander both live in largely glass houses; surely at least one will end up shattered? And that the Energreen office has a dolls’ house quality that means Claudia can watch Ulrik, sent home for bad behaviour, crumble in the lift. And someone, presumably omnipresent Beardy, can spot Claudia through her glass office shredding papers that have her signature on them, meaning Sander could confront her and force her further into the fold. The shots across the glass office make you feel brilliantly exposed, which is, I suppose, what it would feel like to be an Energreen HQ honcho.
Poor Alf. I really thought Mia would wake up so these two could rekindle their romance. And she could hold the key to putting Sander away.
Often Scandi interiors are worth lusting over. Not so Sander’s grim bear rug in his stark, white house.
