SPOILER ALERT: This is for people watching The Bridge at BBC4 pace. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen episodes seven and eight of the third series – and if you’ve seen further ahead, please do not post spoilers.
You can read the previous recaps here.
“Cheer up now. Happiness is a choice, right?” Jeez. All that creepiness couldn’t be for nothing, and so it seems that vampiric Annika is the main murderer. She’s very much of the Kathy Bates school of fangirling: she would definitely hobble Claes if it meant he would be a more pliant recipient of her crazed devotion.
While Annika as the killer – of Helle Anker, Hans (sob), Lars-Ove, Håkan, the Johanssons – may seem a little obvious, I’d bet my bottom kroner that the final episodes won’t disappoint. Remember season two, where Oliver’s murderous ways were revealed ahead of time and then usurped by Gertrud’s much grander plans – a lot can happen in a few hours of The Bridge. Time will tell if Jeanette, who really has had a terrible run of it, and her unborn baby – I knew that enormous pink baby would come into it! – will make it out alive.
Also, what of the others? Do we take Saga’s explanation that Morten wasn’t in his right mind when he identified his killer as his brother? Was Annika really Lukas’s rooftop sniper (I’m not sure I buy that he “expanded too heavily”) and did she then gun him down from a moving car? Maybe, but why? Also, who else felt a shiver when Claes, who up until now seemed more sinned against than sinning, showed chilling callousness when it came to ratting Åsa out. “You’ve made us a laughing stock,” she chastised. “Didn’t I just ... was there anything else you wanted?” I’ve a feeling there’s more to Claes’s new chilliness. I’m not convinced we’ve seen the last of disquieting Lars or his Katie Hopkins-ish wife, Lise, either.
After this week’s episodes, all I want is for poor Saga to be swaddled up, whisked off to a non-creepy cottage in Skåne and kept out of harm’s way, perhaps with a diverting game of Cluedo or two. We watch helplessly as Saga is dealt blow after relentless blow. Her mum has been murdered (that “looks like” a suicide from last week now making sense) – Saga is suspect numero uno, having, it seems, been framed by her vengeful mother; meanwhile, father-figure Hans dies; then Saga forgets to check Annika’s ex-husband for weapons (trust Saga to know that it was regulation 19 she failed to follow), landing poor little Julia in hospital. If the emotional state of these episodes were a song, Dido would sing it.
We see now how incidents from previous weeks – the feeling someone had been in her flat; the email “tip-off” that had her alone in a cemetery at the time her mother died – have lined up neatly to leave Saga in a mess. If only we really could “go back to the beginning”.
As Kjell Grankvist from internal affairs cracks on with investigating Saga, the bluntness that we know and love gets her into ever deeper water. When Linn asks her who might have not liked her mother, Saga chimes: “Probably a lot of people disliked her.” There’s Saga’s comment in an interview with Morten Anker, as remembered by Hanne Thomsen, that she wasn’t a fan; and then there’s the DNA – a nail found in the mum’s car. And I think we can be sure that Saga’s harrowing, violent meltdown at soon-to-be-dead Hans’s bedside will come back to haunt her.
And aside from Saga herself – this really was an emotionally wrought couple of episodes – there was the heartbreaking meltdown of our Lill. Let’s get her over for Cluedo in Skåne, too.
What else do we know?
- Filip and Inger Johansson are the two new victims, with their not-so-merry festive scene. His Father Christmas hat is covering a sawed-open head; his brain is missing. The scene, according to Henrik, resembles another work from Freddie’s collection: Cancelling Christmas. Håkan’s eyeballs are adorning the tree, dangling like a pine air freshener from a rearview mirror. They were foster parents for years, and clearly treated their charges atrociously. They have burn marks in their mouths, this time matching L and G in the Glagolitic alphabet.
- Marc tries to blackmail Freddie but, it turns out, selling a baby is pretty much as bad as buying one, so he steals a watch instead. He tries to sell this, along with various other swag – including a tablet – to someone operating a dodgy operation out of a bike shop. With the help of paparazzi Tina, whose employer’s email, John discovers, matches the code, Saga et al track the device at the same time as the killer uses the comically mundane Find My Tablet to do the same, killing the bike shop’s shady operator on their way. Cue a chase by car (the killer in Kjell Soder’s yellow car), train and on foot that results in only a cracked tablet in a water feature at a shopping centre, and a wet and disgruntled Henrik.
- Tina has been spying on the Holsts – who continue to butt heads over Jeanette – for her anonymous boss, and sees Åsa being helped off with her fake bump (bit of a bum move getting undressed by a window with a secret this big to hide). But it’s Claes who spills the beans, after Åsa confides in him about her jealousy for the increasingly close relationship between Freddie and Jeanette.
- For a while it looks as if Emil Larsson, the man who works at the museum and has an encyclopedic knowledge of Freddie’s collection (and a lovely ceiling light), is the murderer. It turns out Håkan was his social worker, Lars-Ove taught at his school, Hans returned him home when he ran away as a child, and the Johanssons fostered him. It also turns out he used to work at Anderson T.
- When Emil turns up shirtless, stunned and covered in blood, stumbling across fields towards an agog woman in a Volvo, it seems we’ve been barking up the wrong tree. His escape, as with the murders of the others, seems carefully stage-managed; The One That Got Away is another of Freddie’s artworks.
- By identifying the sounds that a blindfolded Emil heard while captured, Cypher-John is able to locate the area where he was held. In the zone: Annika’s house. Creepy Annika, it turns out, was also fostered by the Johanssons.
- Inside Annika’s incredibly lovely house (is there a link between the twistedness of killers and the stylishness of their decor? Annika has some lovely armchairs) is a not so lovely room filled with tools needed to carry out the murders. In contrast, the bedroom is a real adolescent lovenest – the pictures of Claes above the bed remind me of when Chris Waddle used to adorn my walls.
- So, Annika might be the main murderer. (Hats off to garbagepanda BTL who noted that, unfortunately for Claes, Annika is best not challenged.) But did someone help her? And where is she now?
- Pushed to the brink by watching the future parents of “her” baby berate one another, and then hit on by Freddie, Jeanette calls Marc (I wish she wouldn’t) and they head to “their” cottage. Not so happy families. Realising she’s gone, Freddie and Colbert head to the cottage to find Marc murdered and Jeanette missing. Is it safe to assume Annika did this, or is someone else to blame? The chloroforming implies it was Annika.
- The code completed by the mark in Emil’s mouth, it seems we’re going off-piste now with Jeanette’s abducation. It’s clear the murderer wanted a pregnant victim – giving up on chloroforming Åsa after receiving pics of her prosthetic bump – and so their attention (is it safe to say Annika’s attention? You never do know) turns to woebegotten Jeanette.
Henrik and Saga
All I want for Christmas is for Henrik not to turn out to be a bad apple. Seriously, that’s all. Take back that candle that smells like ylang ylang, Father Christmas, I’m not interested. As Saga falls ever deeper down emotional rabbit holes, she turns more to her partner in crime/the sack for support. Where last week she wasn’t up for watching films or having beers with Henrik, now she’s turning up at his door.
Call me soppy, but it’s sweet when he worries that Saga, who is just off to the loo, is leaving. His continued sticking up for her to Linn, and to Kjell in that awks lift scene, is heartening. And the scene where Henrik finds a crumbling Saga in Hans’s recently vacated hospital bed – “you weren’t at your place, or at mine, or at work” – is heartbreaking. He seems to really care for her, and it seems to also be helping him move on, however bittersweet that might be, as he begins to no longer see his family.
But, like some below-the-liners, I worry that Henrik is not all he seems. Am I being paranoid or are clues being laid? For instance, the other time someone made scrambled eggs for a lover this season it was Annika for Claes. What does this mean?! Please mean only that they both like a good breakfast.
And it’s bound to come out next week about Henrik’s drug-taking and, if he’s unlucky (which he will be, this is The Bridge), about his links to Lukas. Is Saga still a dobber? Or has this season changed her irrevocably?
Thoughts and Observations
- Just to reiterate, yes, SuffolkAndGood, it is very much OK to have a crush on the gravel-voiced pathologist.
- Speaking of him, it felt like we lingered too long on the body that had been in clay for it to not come up again.
- It seems Kjell did get on that flight to Singapore. Does that mean he was a red herring and it was chance his bright yellow car is being used – way to be inconspicuous, killer – or is there more to this?
- I know a catalogue of sick murders is not exactly a great use of time, but did anyone else feel a twinge of #YOLO when they clocked that Annika, who seems like she could have been alive since the 18th century, was born in 1985.
- As said before, something’s definitely up with Claes. Was that a spade and some binbags he was carrying when Åsa turned up at his door?
