Spoiler alert: This blog contains spoilers for episode four of Sky Atlantic’s Fortitude
As if things weren’t weird enough in Fortitude, tonight we are reminded that the town is built on an ever-shifting glacier, further increasing that feeling of unease and instability. Plus, there’s a full moon. Hold on to the furniture because the next two episodes are going to change things. Considerably.
Nosy Markus’s personable girlfriend Shirley is seen coming out of the storage unit where the mammoth is kept, and within seconds she’s coughing and sneezing. Is this going to be the same mystery illness that struck young Liam after he’d handled the mammoth tooth, or is it just a cold? On behalf of the townspeople of Fortitude I have now become a massive hypochondriac and have suspended all future visits to the Natural History Museum while the weather is chilly, just in case.
Henry clanks back from the Snow & Ice supermarket with his liquid dinner to find Dan hiding in his living room. Dan confesses that his rage was very much Elena-driven. Back at the station, Morton uses Dan’s obvious partiality as a reason to exclude him from Frank’s interview. There is little Dan can do but watch from the surveillance room.
The affair between Eric and Trish has abated thanks to her recent widowhood, but he obviously still cares for her. Their brief embrace, spied on by Hildur, suggests it was more than just a fling.
Christopher Eccleston may have gone but his prosthetic effigy still gets quite a lot of screen time in the frequent mortuary scenes. Dan plucks a couple of eyebrow follicles from the corpse and insists on taking them to the station himself despite Hildur offering to do it. Why does she want to get hold of the evidence, eh? Unless it is to corrupt it.
The Blue Fox bar is fast becoming Fortitude’s Lake Pub, or “Leck Purb”, if you’ve seen the splendid French mystery thriller The Returned. Natalie and Vincent meet there over some badly timed barbecue ribs (think why that might be a bad choice of lunch) to discuss the latest events. Petra pops by to ask Natalie to DNA-test the eyebrow hair and the blood on Frank’s shirt and they hasten to the lab, fully aware that anything they discover will be inadmissible in court.
Meanwhile, the mists clear around the nature of Markus and Shirley’s relationship. He is grooming her in a rather sinister and unpleasant way, to eat and eat some more. So he’s a feeder, one of those people you see on documentaries who, for reasons of control, encourages their partner to become fatter and fatter. This is even weirder when you consider that Shirley’s mum is the town doctor, Margaret Allardyce.
Back at the police station, Frank’s interview is going around in circles. Unless we missed something in that scene, Frank spins a great big lie about Liam’s illness causing a swelling to rupture, hence all the claret. That’s a pretty big risk to take when your wife is the only one who can back you up, you haven’t checked with her and she currently hates you. She hates him even more when she accidentally overhears him admit to sleeping with Elena when he should have been watching Liam.
And finally we discover Elena’s secret during her police interview: she was convicted of a murder in Spain and served seven years in prison. Her real name is Esmeralda but she’s changed her identity and says there is a theory that humans completely replace their atoms every seven years, so she actually isn’t that person any more. Clever.
At least now we know how Morton got to Fortitude literally before Stoddart’s body was cold. He was coming anyway to investigate the death of Pettigrew. Indeed in all of those Skype conferences with his colleague back in London, all talk is of Pettigrew. Will this mystery man finally give up his secrets?
Now we have a bombshell to deal with: the blood on Frank’s T-shirt is, say Natalie and Vincent, Charlie Stoddart’s. “I didn’t kill Stoddart,” roars Frank at Dan, and Dan replies, “I know you didn’t.” Is anyone else losing the thread a bit?
Dan drives at speed to the Sutter house and finds Liam’s pyjamas covered in dried blood, wrapped in a bag under his bed. Hildur, Dan and Morton come to the shocking conclusion that Liam must have been present at Stoddart’s murder. Oh, that really isn’t nice at all.
Next week, Liam’s lost hours ...
A note on the theme tune
Peeling Off the Layers by Wildbirds & Peacedrums is the evocative tune which accompanies the opening titles. “Water will keep running, rivers will turn,” sings a sad Swedish woman, perfectly capturing the hostile environment and unknown depths of Fortitude. It could have been written for the show. It feels prophetic and significant and, above all, mysteriously chilly. An ideal tone-setter.
You can listen to it here between episodes to recreate that chilly sense of dread.
