Oh gawd. If your week wasn’t already creeped out by The Missing, here’s The Fall (BBC2) again. Serial killing on a Thursday to add to Tuesday’s child abduction. Brilliant, no sleep at all for the next few weeks then, thanks television.
Quick recap. Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) is murdering the clever, professional, attractive dark-haired women of Belfast. Not most people’s idea of a killer; he’s devilishly handsome, a lovely dad, with a caring job (bereavement counsellor, there’s irony there). But every so often the pressure and the rage build up inside, and he turns his deviant fantasies into reality: he achieves the supreme power he seeks, in that he gets to decide who lives and who dies.
Not only do serial killers not look like serial killers, but it’s also possible that this one is in your house right now; Spector has a worrying talent for slipping in, unnoticed. Then he strikes, in the place you feel safest: your own home. That’s a lot of fears to be exploiting.
But the hunter himself is hunted. By DSI Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson), also beautiful, intense, controlling, a little disturbing. And also a predator of sorts (remember how she preyed on Sergeant James Olson, carnally, left claw marks down his back, which were soon joined by bullet holes?). I hope this time we’ll find out more about what made both of them who they are.
At the end of series one Spector fled Belfast with his family, for Scotland. Now he’s returning, as Gibson knew he would. It looks as if the net might be closing in. The 15-year-old Katie knows – or would know, if she wasn’t blinded by teenage love. Annie, who survived an attack, has regained consciousness, and though she doesn’t remember now, given time and Gibson’s help, she will. And Rose from eight or nine years ago has done an efit.
Meanwhile Spector himself is getting careless. Well, probably not careless – everything he does appears to be meticulous and planned – but he’s living dangerously. “Do you think that looks like me,” he asks a woman on the train, about the efit on the front page of her paper. “A wee bit, maybe,” she says. Then he draws a beard on it, like his. “A bit more now,” she says. She’s all right though surely, she’s blond … No, it’s dyed, she tells him, she started to when all this began. Then she tells him she lives alone … SHUT UP!
That’s the almost unbearable tension of watching The Fall. The viewer knows what only one person on screen knows. Not a whodunnit – we know that – it’s a who’ll-he-do-next. C’mon Gibson, get a bloody move on.
It’s not fake-blond train lady who’s next. Maybe the dye worked, or she’s not clever enough. Nor is it young Katie. But Rose from the past, with her efits and now cooperating with Gibson, could blow his cover. It’s her house he creeps into, and then into her bed …
The Fall took some flak last time round, for fetishising – glamourising even – murder. Murder of women. There was something about the way Spector arranged his victims afterwards, as if for a photoshoot, that was more disturbing than the act of killing itself. There’s none of that here, not yet at least. Actually there’s not even death yet, but ... well, put it this way, you wouldn’t want to be in Rose’s shoes.
What there is, as there was before, is a dark, brooding psychological thriller, as much about the two protagonists as what they’re doing. And about their similarities (there’s a lot of flipping between the two as they do similar things). Two brilliant performances, from Dornan and Anderson. She is utterly mesmerising. He is believable both as psychopath and lovely, beautiful man, which is what makes him so scary. Their – and The Fall’s – return is good news for television, and for locksmiths you’d imagine, especially in the Belfast area. Less good for peace of mind.
After which some mirth is called for. And provided, by Babylon (Channel 4), a whole series, following Danny Boyle’s pilot earlier this year. It is to the police what Twenty Twelve and W1A were to the Olympics and the BBC, though bolder, sharper, swearier. Maybe more like The Thick of It then, with which it shares some creative DNA. And, like TTOI, there are, in with the deadpan insanity, some truths. About the police, their image issues, target culture, political interference, privatisation etc. As well as – as you’d expect with Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong writing – some glorious lines. “I’m on 24-hour-a-day storm watch yeah, I sleep like a cokey meerkat on an electric fence, that’s me relaxing, I’ve got a map inside my head of all the trouble in the world and you just popped up on the radar like Godzilla’s hard on, and I will cut you loose if you ever, ever fuck me again Charlie, all right?” says Commissioner Richard Miller. Played by James Nesbitt, who looks like he’s enjoying himself after – during – all the misery of The Missing.
