Spoiler alert: This blog contains spoilers for season five, episodes one and two of Spiral.
Catch up with the season four finale blog
Welcome, Spiral fans, to our episode recaps of the French crime drama, returning to BBC4 after almost two years away from our screens, against the most sobering backdrop of the Charlie Hebdo attack.
Sandrine and Lucie
Dragged from the canal, bound together face-to-face, the investigation into the mother and daughter’s death is currently our team’s main focus. Under threat of being kicked upstairs, Herville is for once backing Capitaine Berthaud – albeit with extremely mixed consequences – and the team are making progress: spotting the blood splatters that confirmed the family home as a murder scene, locating Stéphane Jaulin and his son Léo with something approaching efficiency, finding the laptop in brother Olivier Delorme’s freezer.
In fact if anyone (Herville aside) looks in danger of bungling, it is Juge Roban, who seems very certain of Jaulin’s guilt, despite his solid alibi and phone records, and what seemed like genuine shock at the death of his wife and daughter. There’s is likely more going on with Jaulin than we yet know – 2,000 euros seems quite a lot of painting-and-decorating cash, and there are lots of hints that he is violent when he’s angry – but given the laptop discovery and the paintings, Berthaud’s instincts look at least half right.
Which is something of a miracle, given her fragile mental state. We rejoin Spiral mere months after Sami’s death. Laure’s all over the place: edgier than ever, drinking too much, eating badly, 15 weeks pregnant but too caught up in her grief to notice. She’s oblivious to Tintin’s quieter distress, the way he’s struggling with his home life as he grieves and recovers from his own brush with death, and it is Gilou, with his new regime of early nights, sobriety and exercise, who is keeping the trio upright. (Alright then, Laure upright.) But even with Gilou as peacemaker of a sort, the team’s emotions feel rawer than ever.
Of course, Laure’s pregnancy is a big part of that. Too late for an abortion at her request in France (the time limit is 12 weeks after conception, except for certain medical reasons), she says she will go to Holland for the procedure. But given all the heavily underlined signposts from the writers and directors – that the current case involves small children, Laure’s general sense of grief-fuelled chaos, Gilou’s influence, Tintin’s four kids, Jaulin’s feelings for Lucie and Léo – I wonder whether that will be the case. And it wasn’t just Laure who found Gilou’s offer of emotional, practical and financial help touching. I was quite moved myself by her friend’s plan. Though God knows what the reality of the pair sharing a flat and looking after a child would be.
Kevin Leseuer
Meanwhile, Roban has another case on his desk: the death of a policeman, run over by – so les flics maintain – Kevin Leseuer, who seemed a great deal less sure of this fact when he first met Josephine, than when he arrived in front of the judge represented by Tisseron, who regularly defends the police. Also handy for the police: that Leseuer’s car has been scrapped, and that the police car Joséphine spots with a dent in the bonnet has been fixed after “a chair fell from a balcony on to it”. I’m quite looking forward to the pair tackling police corruption together, even if the way in which Roban involved Mme Karlsson in the case drew a long stare from Marianne.
Is it just me, or does Roban feel more eccentric this series? His hair is more bouffant, his attitude more devil-may-care, and his way of eating what did look like quite a delicious tart more greedy. I’m not surprised that Pierre thought he’d give it a miss when it was belatedly offered.
Thoughts and observations
• As ever, Spiral’s writers manage to weave together the lawyers, judges and police seamlessly. So Clément is Jaulin’s brief in the murder case being run by Roban and Laure, while Joséphine finds her way into the judge’s office thanks to the pair’s determination to prevent a police cover-up.
• There’s something off about the Delorme grandparents don’t you think? They seem almost as cross with their daughter as they do with her husband. And desperate to take custody of Léo. (Although maybe in the circumstances, that is understandable).
• A nice bit of scripting that had Olivier ranting about Nazis outside his window, only for them to actually exist.
• I’ve always thought Gilou would make someone (me) a good husband. Now he just needs to go and find himself “a proper girlfriend” as Laure puts it.
• I liked the postcard in the police station: don’t forget to lick my boots. Less impressed that not even Laure’s office is safe from Keep Calm … posters.
• Interesting that Pierre didn’t rush to tell Joséphine about the Bar Council – and equally that Roban thinks he’s being set up for failure. I wonder whether the judge’s instincts are good here?
• Joséphine and Pierre remain, of course, the most glamorous couple on television. A two-year break had somehow made me forget how ludicrously good-looking they both are. And chic of course – Joséphine’s cashmere-and-silk lounge-wear an example to anyone (me again) currently slouching round the house in pyjamas.
• Also the result of the two-year break – I admit, I found myself struggling to remember all the twists and turn of series four that got us to this point. It’s to the show’s credit, I think, that it works regardless.
