SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read on if you haven’t seen series one, episode one of Fortitude.
‘In this place, things can come at you from nowhere’
Ludicrous, oversized puffa jackets at the ready. We’re heading to Fortitude, the tiny, picturesque, Arctic mining town where the polar bears outnumber the human population (a mixture of Brits and Scandinavians), the winter dark lasts 24 hours a day, and, despite guns being mandatory, no one has ever committed a violent crime.
Actually, scratch the last bit. The “infinity days since last murder” banner is going to have to come down, because by the end of this feature-length opening episode of Sky’s big-budget new drama, there has been a killing, and a grisly one at that. Environmentalist Charlie Stoddart (Christopher Eccleston) has been found in his home with chunks torn out of him – and it seems that a human, rather than a polar bear, was the culprit. Given that Charlie is a man with more than a few enemies, it looks like we have a proper murder mystery on our hands.
Yet categorising Fortitude as a straight-up whodunnit might undersell the show. Instead, like Twin Peaks, with which it shares some marked similarities, Fortitude’s murder feels more like the entry point into a bigger conundrum: what precisely is the deal with this strange place? This is determinedly watercooler drama, which encourages viewers to speculate on the meaning of every small detail. Secrets and lies hang over the town like the aurora borealis.
Prime suspects
No one, you suspect, is playing with an entirely straight bat. The town sheriff, gruff alcoholic Dan Anderssen (played by Game of Thrones’ Richard Dormer), possesses a happy habit of turning up at crime scenes seconds after the event, not only in the case of Stoddart’s murder, but also in the opening scene, when he cleans up the aftermath of a fatal polar bear attack on geologist Billy Pettigrew. “No engine, no siren,” notes Henry Tyson, the terminally ill nature photographer caught up in the incident, whose attempt to save Pettigrew resulted in him mistakenly shooting him in the head. Henry alleges that Anderssen murdered Pettigrew – does he know something? Or perhaps he is stalling, attempting to delay his own enforced departure from Fortitude, a place without palliative care facilities.
Anderssen isn’t the only potential suspect in the Stoddart case. The town’s governor, Hildur Odegard (Sofie Gråbøl) has motive, given that Stoddart’s environmental impact assessment was likely to put the kibosh on her plan for a luxury hotel “hewn out of a glacier”. And there is miner Jason, who, with his mate Ronnie, has found mammoth remains in the ice and is looking to make a small fortune. Did Stoddart’s angry refusal of Jason’s grubby offer prompt him to take more violent action? Certainly his disappearance into the wilds with Natalie, one of the scientists at the research facility, indicates some sort of guilt. In fact, the one person we can perhaps safely rule out is the one currently under arrest for the crime: Vincent, the visiting research scientist and badger expert, who appears to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but is being kept in custody to prevent people from panicking.
An inspector calls
Tasked with sifting through all of this evidence is DCI Eugene Morton, a visiting detective and pathologist from the Met, played by Stanley Tucci. An outsider with a quick mind and an eye for detail, Morton strikes me as bearing more than a passing resemblance to Twin Peaks’ sleuth-in-residence Dale Cooper, though Tucci gives him a far more enigmatic quality than Kyle MacLachlan’s wide-eyed Cooper ever had. He certainly doesn’t look one to suffer fools, butting heads with Anderssen almost from the moment he got off the plane. Their terse relationship looks set to be one of the show’s more watchable ones, and has already produced some crackling dialogue – I particularly enjoyed the way Morton turned small talk about local cuisine into a withering assessment of Anderssen’s limitations: “I’ve never eaten lutefisk, and you’ve never conducted a murder investigation.”
Secrets and lies
The people in Fortitude share an “understanding”, Stoddart’s wife tells Morton – and already we have seen evidence of bed-hopping. Frank, an army vet turned search and rescue officer, is carrying on with mysterious hotel worker Elena, neglecting his wife Jules and son Liam in the process. Anderssen, too, seems to have his eye on Elena; although the fact that she was waiting behind her hotel room door with a rifle when he came to visit, suggests his affections are not reciprocated. I would wager that is just the tip of a very large iceberg. We will have to keep an eye out for swingers’ wind chimes. Did anyone spot any in the first episode? (Other than Professor Stoddart’s, of course. No doubt we’ll learn more about his nocturnal habits in later episodes.)
Supernatural sightings
Is Fortitude a straight crime drama, or something more? Certainly in this opening episode, there are a couple of moments that hinted at the unreal. What, for example, is wrong with Liam? Mumps, polio, or something even worse? What prompted him to clamber out of the window, risking severe frostbite? Might it have had something to do with the mammoth remains? Why does the camera linger ominously over said mammoth remains every time they appear in shot? And, most pressingly, what was going on with that pig in the hyperbaric chamber at the research facility? Its anguished squeals are definitely going to stay with me for a while.
Notes, quotes and the rest
- Another bit of deception: Odegard’s police-officer husband is hiding the fact that he is in hospital not because of a misadventure while fixing some storm shutters, but because he was involved in an altercation with Yuri, the man Anderssen confronted over not having a hunting licence.
- Incidentally, Yuri is already my favourite character, mainly because of the sing-song way he shouted: “Sheriff, I have brought you back your fuc-king rifle.” (It doesn’t quite have the same humour written down.)
- I was a bit puzzled by Yuri’s surprise at Anderssen’s handcuffs. They seemed to have something inscribed on them, but I couldn’t quite make out what. Any ideas?
- Was that Frank’s own blood he was wiping after his tryst with Elena, or hers?
- DCI Morton, it seems, left the UK before the attack on Stoddart was made public. Was it him who was tipped off by Henry’s phone call, which claimed that Anderssen was responsible for Pettigrew’s death?
- Stoddart was killed by a combination of cleaver, knife and potato peeler.
