SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read on if you haven’t seen series one, episode two of Fortitude.
‘This place is fierce, merciless, neither good or bad’
Fortitude, according to the people who live there, is a lot of things. It’s a “forensic treasure house”; somewhere that is “vivid, unsullied, wild”; a place where everybody “is running away from something”. More than anything else, though, Fortitude is a place where the inhabitants talk about nothing but Fortitude. Fortitude, Fortitude, Fortitude. Change the record already.
That preoccupation speaks to one of the major flaws of this patchy second episode. While we’re forever being assured that Fortitude is dangerous and conflicted and just really, really interesting, tangible evidence to support such bluster is a bit thin on the ground. We’re in classic “telling not showing” territory here, and in the absence of any major revelations, it makes for a glacially slow instalment. It doesn’t help that there’s no one among this cast of characters – Stanley Tucci’s great turn as DCI Morton aside – who’s particularly engrossing. There may be secrets and subterfuge by the sled-load, but Fortitude is sorely lacking those fascinating character quirks that made – to draw a comparison that creator Simon Donald must already be sick of hearing – a show such as Twin Peaks so watchable
Still, the mystery at Fortitude’s centre - who killed Professor Stoddart, and why? - is compelling enough to hold our attention for the time being, and those peculiar side-details (there are bodies in the cemetery that still have plague in them!) keep piling up. Plus, as practically every review of the show has pointed out, it does look ravishing; all gleaming white snowscapes. There’s certainly enough to be getting on with, though I do wish they’d hurry it along.
Prime suspects
Jason the miner remains the No 1 person of interest in the eyes of the police, his altercation with Stoddart and hasty retreat to the cabin with Natalie looking very suspicious indeed. After being apprehended, he eventually reveals where he got the mammoth’s tooth from, though is keeping schtum on the rest of his haul.
The finger of guilt is also hanging heavily over Hildur, who had the most to lose from Stoddart’s potential discovery of mammoth remains. On the face of it, she’s continuing to lead the investigation, but her deletion of Stoddart’s voicemail to Trish and instruction to Natalie that the results of the tests on the mammoth’s tooth must be reported only to her, suggest the beginnings of an almighty cover-up. Henry the photographer certainly thinks so. “This new policeman, you think he’s going to sniff you out,” he says to Hildur, with more than a hint of schadenfreude in his voice. What’s the backstory between these two?
Also looking a little bit shifty is Ronnie, who attempts to make a run for it with his daughter, only to be thwarted by the sky-high prices of seaplanes. Still, he has a plan B, although we’ll have to wait until next week to find out more.
An inspector calls
Meanwhile, Morton continues to get to grips with Fortitude, slowly acquiring the confidences of the town’s slightly reticent citizens, while at the same time quietly building mental case files for all of them. This is a man with a gimlet eye for detail – witness his smart deconstruction of the crime scene in Stoddart’s house – who also has that happy knack of getting people to divulge information without even knowing it. By the end of the episode he’s even built a rapport of sorts with Anderssen, with the pair sharing a tequila and a candid conversation about the nature of loneliness (both are single). There’s still a wariness between them, but also perhaps a deeper understanding of each other. Which isn’t to say that Morton doesn’t consider Anderssen a prime suspect: we know that he’s investigating the death of Billy Pettigrew as well as Stoddart’s, and you suspect that once Henry sobers up, Morton’s going to have one of his friendly, non-confrontational chats with him.
Secrets and lies
More evidence this week that Fortitude is essentially a very chilly swingers’ retreat. We know that Hildur’s husband, Eric, has been carrying on with Stoddart’s wife Trish, a detail that Morton uses to his advantage when trying to get access to the interview room. Frank the search-and-rescue man may be feeling guilty about abandoning his son, but that hasn’t prevented him from continuing his affair with Elena. And Jason is carrying on with Natalie, who may well be carrying on with lots of other people as well. “This is Fortitude”, she says. “It gets cold, we get close.”
Supernatural sightings
If Fortitude is a show tinged with the supernatural, it isn’t letting on to that fact this week, preferring to stay grounded in the prosaic procedural details of the murder case. That said, the detail of things not decaying raises plenty of possibilities for strange goings-on in later episodes ...
Notes, quotes and the rest
• If this week’s episode was a little plodding, there’s at least some action to look forward to next week, going by the credits. Among other things, they showed Anderssen getting shot at, Liam convulsing wildly and Yuri the gun-borrowing mystery man up to what looked like no good
• The fact that Stoddart had time to pause his film would suggest that the person who finished him off was someone that he knew or was even expecting.
• Incidentally, Stoddart was watching Harvey, the 1950 film starring James Stewart about a man who hangs around with a giant, invisible rabbit.
• I’m going to have a stab at guessing that the person shooting at Anderssen in that brief shot was Jason’s brother Ciaran, whom the officers were looking to speak to at the episode’s close.
• Another sign of how profoundly out of their depth Fortitude’s tiny police staff are this week, as Anderssen had to show Ingrid how to use a pistol.
• Despite living at the north pole, Stoddart has Sky. Strange, that.
