For some reason, my ability to stay awake, even for the most gripping and heartrending drama, has suddenly lessened. So my understanding of the start of the second series of the Danish thriller The Killing is... well, gappy.
Sarah Lund, detective extraordinaire, miseryguts supreme, is out of her Icelandic gansey. Now she's arrayed in a new jumper, so deep red that it appears blood-soaked. Sarah has lost her nice job investigating brutal murders. Now she's doing some, um, kind of...
Sorry. Fell asleep there. I think Sarah's a kind of security guard or something now, having failed so tragically in her last investigation, the one in the first series of Forbryselden.
Anyaway. Whatsisname, the granite-faced investigator now investigating an orrible murder of a woman found stabbed a zillion times (one fatally) and tied to a pole in a park, comes to Sarah, well known for her spooky insight into murders and murderers, and lures her into the investigation. They reckon it's the woman's husband (why am I not married, remind me?) but they want to check with Sarah's instincts.
Sarah is just sitting there thinkin', and listening to the zeitgeist, when it is revealed that the husband has confessed. So Sarah goes back to boringland, and...
I'm joking. Of course Sarah has realised that it's not the husband.
At least... in the first series everyone became a suspect at some stage, and like others watching I suspected every character, to the point where I couldn't go to Superquinn without suspecting the checkout clerk, and never mind Lidl.
Last time, an unnervingly sexy clean-cut politician on the broad road from idealist to sleazebag was chief suspect. This time he's been replaced by a stocky new justice minister who is facing down the right-wing anti-immigration party's demands for banning of specific groups - a thing which has never been done in the history of the staunchly fair and egalitarian Denmark. No doubt the minister is soon to be implicated in at least one murder.
For the moment (as far as I understood between helpless snoozes - this isn't because of the writing; it's incredibly gripping, I just can't help it; once 8pm comes I'm out cold - the main suspects are a secret group within the Danish armed forces. A second body has immediately been found: Vyg (Myg? Smyg? Styg?) - who was about to be 'deployed' to Helmand.
But as soon as you start to suspect him, Vyg (?) is found hanging upside down, dead as a cabbage, with half a dogtag dripping with his draining blood.
Somewhere in there is a handsome, sad man in jail and longing for his wife and child, but involved with all this Afghanistan stuff. He seems to be a damaged man, perhaps suffering post-traumatic disorder caused by killing plenty of Afghanis.
Oh, and the woman who was stabbed a zillion times: a video has turned up with her giving some kind of Islamic anti-Danish message. In Danish, of course, which sounds as if she's speaking through a mouthful of turnip.
I'm dying to watch the second, or maybe third episode. I just wish they'd sell it on DVD now so I could actually go back and check what really happened.
Oh, and the acting and writing and direction are great. And the sets, with their moody, dark vision of Denmark, itself a character: an honest country under attack by the forces of corruption.
