Spoiler alert: This blog contains spoilers for episode one of Sky Atlantic’s Fortitude
Welcome to Fortitude, says the sign by the icy road into the quiet Arctic outpost where nothing ever happens and a chill wind always blows. As research scientist Natalie (Sienna Guillory) explains to new recruit Vincent (Luke Treadaway), everyone in Fortitude has a job, a place to live and no one ever commits crime. Until, that is, the gory discovery at Professor Stoddart’s house. The town is full of secrets, guilty exchanges, unspoken ambitions and simmering resentment. And they’ve also got a woolly mammoth carcass sticking out of the snow.
You weren’t expecting that, were you? Not the mammoth, the murder of Professor Stoddart (Christopher Eccleston). That’s a brave trick to pull off, killing off a main character in the opening episode. I was looking forward to Stoddart digging up that mammoth, as well.
Before even two minutes have elapsed, Henry Tyson (Michael Gambon) has shot dead a man who was clamped in the jaws of a polar bear on that spectacular Arctic beach. Was this an accident or not? It’s hard to tell. And why didn’t the police report into the man’s death mention the big bullet hole in his forehead? Henry’s own end isn’t far away either and the governor of Fortitude has ordered him back to the mainland to see out his days in a hospice. My guess is, he won’t go quietly. I do hope not, anyway.
As we meet each new character, it becomes apparent that everyone in Fortitude mistrusts everyone else. Governor Hildur Odegard (Sofie Gråbøl) tells her husband Eric – recovering from his accidental blunder into a bear trap when we meet him – that she doesn’t trust him. Jules Sutter (Jessica Raine) doesn’t trust Doctor Allerdyce’s diagnosis of her sick little boy, Liam, and we know she shouldn’t even slightly trust her husband Frank Sutter (Nicholas Pinnock) because the handsome search and rescue man is having an affair with local hotel worker Elena (Verónica Echegui).
All of this emotional unrest takes place against a background of downright weirdness. Professor Stoddart mentions that the polar bears are acting oddly and becoming more aggressive towards humans. Hence everyone in Fortitude carries a rifle for self-protection. Meanwhile, the aforementioned mammoth could be the most exciting scientific find in decades. But it would prevent Governor Odegard from opening her planned tourist resort, not to mention spoil the plans of Jason and his friend who want to sell it for a ton of cash, and Stoddart is determined to stop them. Make a note of this under “motives”.
“You know, in this place, things can come at you from nowhere,” says Elena to Frank after another steamy snogging session in his pickup truck. I don’t think she is just talking about the polar bears. And why is she standing with her rifle aimed at the door when sheriff Dan Anderssen (Richard Dormer) comes to knock, then changes his mind? What’s their history?
“We live in the one place on earth where we’re guaranteed a quiet life,” says Governor Odegard as the police burst into the conference room during her important presentation about the proposed ice hotel. She boasts that Fortitude is “the safest place on earth”. Oh dear. She might as well have raised a glass and toasted “the best Christmas in Walford ever”. It’s a bloodbath out there.
In all of the fuss, I had clean forgotten the angry bearded man who borrowed Dan’s rifle, but now he’s back to return the gun. On finding an empty police station, he breaks into a drawer and retrieves the gun Dan confiscated from him. But what is engraved on the handcuffs he also finds that so enrages him? I freeze-framed but couldn’t make it out. Did anyone else?
It’s getting very Twin Peaks back at the research centre where Jules stumbles on a low-lit room in which she finds a distressed pig in a hyperbaric chamber. They weren’t joking when they said her son’s treatment for frostbite would be experimental.
Finally we meet the enigmatic DCI Morton (Stanley Tucci) on the flight into town where he sits, unknowingly, next to Professor Stoddart’s soon-to-be widow. Governor Odegard gets the news that a detective from London will arrive shortly and we’re all left wondering how they heard the news so quickly. Good question.
When she brings Morton to meet Dan at the murder scene, the resident police chief could not be frostier if he’d walked around for half an hour in just his pants. Governor Odegard explains that Morton comes from an FBI background and investigated air crashes before this. “I bet there are wind chimes”, he grins at Dan, using all of his deduction skills and the tip-off from Trish Stoddart. When Morton suggests wind chimes are the Fortitude equivalent of pampas grass, denoting the presence of swingers, Dan’s scowl grows ever more deep-set, but he doesn’t deny it.
And why does Morton seem to almost enjoy telling Trish Stoddart the news about her unfortunate husband, even ensuring he gets there before Dan? Finally, clever officer Petra points out that Morton would have had to leave London while Stoddart was still alive and asks him how he managed to arrive with such speed. He brushes her off. He’s definitely hiding something too. Is he even a police officer?
One episode in, and the snowy town is already a complex tangle of seething repression and unspoken dangers. Great, isn’t it?
