The Valhalla Murders – Episodes 7 & 8

Here we are already at episode 7 and we have a lot of ground to cover! Grab a drink and settle in. Suddenly we’re getting the whole story but this is an avalanche of information. It’s not great storytelling that we’ve had to wait this long for answers and suddenly we’re submerged in new information.

We begin in the most silent and boring barber shop in all of Iceland. There’s opera playing, dark panelled walls and I guess it smells of rich mahogany. In another room there’s probably many leather-bound books. Magnus is hanging out with the rich and influential, angling for a bigger budget and more power thanks to his success solving the case. But the past is about to catch up to him big-time. A elderly press photographer shows the police a photograph of Magnus in uniform when he was part of Thomas’s search party. Only now is it coming clear who Maggie is, the name that Tryggvi dropped at the end of episode six. Is this the fault of the subtitling or the script? Had it had been clear it would have made for a much better cliff-hanger. As we’ve seen, everyone in Iceland knows each other and people are only spoken about using their first name, or nicknames. Unfortunately this rather confuses the rest of us.

Kata and Hakon decide they will try to open an investigation into Magnus. Hakon says “If we are wrong both our careers are over”. The big question is was Magnus the rapist at the Valhalla home? This series has been so bleak and yet these episodes manage to get bleaker. Poor young Fannar is dead, in what seems to be a very bloody suicide. Arnar sees that has the same scar in the same place as the Valhalla boys. This abuse is not a historical problem. The rapist is still at work. It’s a real shock to see our steely Milk Tray man cry, whimpering alone in his car. There’s another terrible question to answer – was Thor pimping out his own son? Remember how he’d come into a lot of money just before he died?

There’s no mystery for Kata – she’s sure. In her mind Magnus has been tried and convicted. But is this evidence or a personal vendetta against a senior police officer who has placed her on leave after the death of Tommi’s father? Kata and Arnar meets in Iceland’s least popular restaurant (I wonder if it’s next door to the barbershop?). Without saying a great deal, Arnar basically implies that Kata is nuts. He’s got personal history with Magnus. Can he see past that and be objective?

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The Valhalla Murders – Episodes 5 & 6

Hang on tight, as the five minutes fly by in a flash; throughout these episodes the pacing and tension is a masterclass. You get the sense there’s no time to waste as we rush onwards to the conclusion. There’s a furious and physical confrontation between Kata and son Kari. She’s now desperate to know if he was involved with the rape of Telma. Despite this she still throws away his hoodie. Arnar wants to know if Kata is up to the job and if he can rely on her, but both of them are very distracted with major family drama brewing.

Petur the State Prosecutor shows up again, contrite and admitting his negligence to Kata in not investigating the boys home reports properly, saying he’ll do all he can to help. You get the distinct impression he’s only there because he’s worried about his reputation. I’m pretty sure he’d never repeat this publicly.

Tommi’s DNA proves what we suspected from episode 1 – he is the cold case skeleton, murdered 30 years ago. He never did manage to escape Valhalla. The search for Steinthor gears up. He’s gone to ground, even before the media name him as the prime suspect. You’d be surprised how many small silver Toyotas have had a prang and their front panel replaced with a red one. Maybe two-colour repair jobs are an Icelandic thing? When Kata does find the garage where the car is hidden, the place is clearly also being used as the murder’s base and there’s a lot of information to be found in there.

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The Valhalla Murders – Episodes 3 & 4

The story moves along at quite a pace in these episodes. We’re learning a lot but still feeling pretty far from a resolution. What we don’t end up with is a long list of silly red herrings, which The Bridge and The Killing were famous for, and that is absolutely fine by me. The focus remains on the victims and how the unforgivable events at the Valhalla Boys Home connect them.

The missing woman Brynja is the body discovered murdered in the basement. She is given a glowing character reference by Hakon, the local police officer, as a lovely old lady. But the woman working in the town archives says quite the opposite – that Brynja worked in a nursing home subsequently to her time at Valhalla and was accused of neglect.

As Kata sits in the most picturesque petrol station you could ever imagine, surrounded by amazing snow-capped mountains, tech expert Erlingur takes a break from the endless CCTV work of this crime and sends her the video we’ve all been waiting for; the one recovered from Kari’s phone. It’s just as bad as we’d suspected – it shows a young girl being raped by a gang of teenage boys. How is her seemingly adorable chubby-cheeked son involved?

The files on the Valhalla home have been taken from the archive by the Ministry of Justice where, years ago, they compiled a report on all of Iceland’s children’s homes. Petur is the State Prosecutor, who pops up to defend the indefensible. The report is suspiciously short, marking the home as “exemplary” despite only four of the 12 boys being quoted. Petur says there’s nothing suspicious about this as the home was only open from 1986 to 1988, and Kata reacts angrily, overwhelmed by this obvious cover-up and by what’s going on with Kari. She’s given several serious dressing downs by Helga, who must have now realised that Kata her loose cannon.

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The Valhalla Murders: Episodes 1 & 2 – BBC4

Velkominn guys! Welcome to Iceland, or indeed welcome back if you’re a fan of Trapped. Exciting Netflix news this week in that department as we look forward to a new sequel season titled Entrapped. This nice noir news also neatly heralds the start of The Valhalla Murders, similarly co-produced by Netflix, but available in the UK to watch on BBC4 in their classic Saturday night Scandi slot.

To stalwarts like me it feels familiar as we watch a man meet a grizzly end in an icy harbour, but this is not the backwoods of Trapped – this is the hustle bustle of modern Reykjavik with a cop who has attitude in spades and reminds me for all good reasons Sarah Lund (the original Scandi icon from The Killing). Our detective is the charming, resolute, and self-assured Katrin ‘Kata’ Gunnarsdottir (played by Nina Dogg Filippusdottir) who, at least in the first episode, looks comfortably in control both at home with her son Kari and ex-husband Egill and at work dealing with her colleagues and her journalist pals. How refreshing! A female detective with her life going well and a promotion due to her any day now.

But no! As the serial killer’s victims stack up, so Kata’s life begins to unravel. She’s snubbed at work in favour of Helga, who is made Head of Criminal Investigations. Kata has been in CI for 10 years and Helga is the new girl from Narcotics. She’s younger than Kata and far less experienced but is mates with the National Commissioner. Cue Kata, seething furiously, being ignored and talked over a series of offices. Magnus (played by Sigurdur Skulason), the guy older from the Metropolitan Police temporarily in charge, looks relieved to be stepping back and basically tells Kata to suck it up and get on with it. Will unravelling this knotty case be her stepping stone back to the limelight?

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'The Bridge' – Series 4, Episode 7

This is a full review of The Bridge: Series 4, Episode 7. Catch up with all the reviews here. Don’t read on unless you’re completely up-to-date on the BBC2 schedule!
Happily we still have a Henrik this week. Our brave and stupid Dane gets off with a serious pain in the leg and a severe tongue lashing from boss Lillian about his ridiculous risk-taking. As predicted the GoPro killer (what is his/ her official nickname?) didn’t want to shoot Henrik as death to them is the easy way out. He wants his victims to suffer.
The Case
Chris flees from crazy Frank locking him up in the old factory. Frank looks like his hobby is well-planned. He’s got history in kidnapping kids.
Decapitation and firing squad are the methods left unchecked on the team’s control room list. So that’s equal parts terrifying and spectacular.
Mysterious dead Douglas was a Private Investigator who Niels says he hired after his wife’s death to hurry the investigation along. Saga uncovers private police documents in his office that show the mole in the team is working hard on leaking sensitive information all over the place.
Saga is on to Anna, Astrid and Frank thanks to Chris’ confession about killing Dan in the Village of the Damned. Frank seems so reasonable but there’s a monster is hiding just under the surface of respectability. In this episode Frank’s answer to everything is violence. The tension is unbearable as Frank locks the front door and goes to find Astrid toting a shotgun. (“For fucks’ sake! We demand a happy ending!” is written in my notes at this point.) Why did the sniper not take the clear shot he had at Frank’s squishy little head? And how come they can organise a whole SWAT team for a cold case with little to no notice? Those questions aside, good work team!
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'The Bridge: Series 4' – Preview

Have you ever been so excited you put your fist in your mouth to suppress a squeal of glee? Have you ever been so excited that you could swallow your own fist down and keep going up past the elbow and beyond, squealing away regardless? It’s not often I go full fangirl about anything, but guys, it’s nearly time to see the very last series of The Bridge! And I am so excited. You can keep your Infinity War. This is the original most ambitious crossover event. It’s time for Denmark and Sweden to put their differences aside and work together again on outrageously gruesome killing.
It goes without saying that someone is murdered near to the Oresund Bridge. Yes, it’s a woman and yes it’s totally brutal. However you feel about that on TV more generally, you have to admit this is The Bridge’s classic calling card. Why change now? This woman is Margrethe Thormod, the head of the Danish Immigration Board. And she and her team have recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons – filmed clinking champagne glasses and celebrating the deportation of a gay man back to a Muslim country where he will most probably be executed. Taariq Shirazi has gone to ground and Margrethe is murdered in a way that seems to have cultural and religious connotations. Is there a connection?
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'Kiri' – Channel 4

It’s always exciting to see Sarah Lancashire back on TV. I’ve been a big fan for a little while, since Happy Valley really, and drama lovers will agree that she’s a big draw for a new series. Writer Jack Thorne has another ripped-from-the-headlines story for us and hopes are high as he wrote National Treasure broadcast in 2016 which won the best mini-series BAFTA. That was about historic cases of sexual abuse, drawing on various high-profile scandals involving celebrities. This is about vulnerable children under the care of social services and calls to mind some recent real-life cases.
Sarah Lancashire plays Miriam Grayson, a Bristolian social worker who decides to offer unsupervised visits between 9-year-old Kiri and her grandparents. Kiri is a young black girl about to be adopted by a middle-class white family and social services agree she ought to know “where she came from”, and have a chance to develop links with appropriate members of her birth family. While Kiri is on her visit, she goes missing, apparently abducted by her ex-con birth father Nathaniel. This is all made clear in the first 30 minutes, so knowing the laws of TV drama, this means literally anything could have happened to her.
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'Unspeakable' – Channel 4

Busy mother of two Jo (Indira Varma) has a lovely boyfriend in Danny (Luke Treadway). who has moved in to her suburban home and is adjusting to family life. On an otherwise normal day some mystery person drops a bombshell. On the school run Jo receives an anonymous text message alleging her boyfriend is having an inappropriate relationship with her 11-year-old daughter Katie.
We see Jo over the course of an agonising day sitting at home in an empty house, dwelling on the message, snooping around but getting no answers. Nothing really happens, but it all happens on Jo’s face thanks to Indira’s gut-wrenching acting. Danny is sexy, and it seems Katie and her friends have noticed judging by their comments on Instagram. Is Danny predatory? Worse still is Katie reciprocating? It’s a very uncomfortable thought but it’s close to how young women think. What is harassment? What is flattery? The lines are blurred when children are still learning the boundaries, and people can and will take advantage. “She’s at that age” is a catch-all for unusual teenage behaviour, but what if something unpleasant is provoking it?
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'The Handmaid's Tale'

If you’ve not yet heard anything about the The Handmaid’s Tale, let me give you a hand getting out from under that rock where you’ve been hiding. This is an MGM production being show on Hulu in America. They seem to be a good 7 episodes ahead of us. Sadly, even in 2017, sometimes America is ahead of us in tv land. It’s great to have synchronised start dates, but it’s still not the norm. Avoiding spoilers for this much talked-about show is going to be a killer.
A few weeks after starting in the USA this 10 part drama series has been picked up by Channel 4 in the UK, which, as the young, intelligent, and left-leaning political channel is a really good fit for their brand and a bit of a coup. The series is based on a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and despite its startlingly relevant content was actually written in 1985. So this dystopian future Atwood envisaged is 30 years closer than we’d have hoped for, and none of her themes are any less relevant or possibilities presented any less realistic. In interviews Atwood says that none of these war crimes in the fictional Republic of Gilead are entirely made up – all have happened somewhere on the globe. This really is extremely dark stuff. Do we as the audience have the stamina to get through it?

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The handmaids distinctive uniforms at a ceremony

 
The series opening is distressing, as our heroine Offred is violently parted from her husband and daughter, but it’s not a tense escape. We know she’ll get caught. The rippling tension comes from her social position at her new posting with the Commander (Joseph Feinnes) and his wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski).
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'Westworld' – On the Box

Big things were expected for Westworld, the telly reboot of the 1973 sci-fi film, and big things were achieved. It was HBO’s biggest series debut in three years. And it looks magnificent!
Westworld is a theme park – the newcomers are the players, the high-paying guests who get to live out their cowboy frontier town fantasy. Sex and violence is the top two reasons people seem to play, and sexy violence is probably competing for third place. The innocent townspeople who populate the game are extremely advanced androids (incredibly beautiful and faces full of character), who live in a Groundhog day-dream state, to please the guests and keep them entertained.
Through wholesome Delores (Evan Rachel Wood) and her cowboy lover Teddy (James Marsden) we briefly glimpse a clichéd romance fantasy before life quickly turns sour. It’s horrific to watch, and worse still she wakes in blissful ignorance the next day to be preyed upon all over again. Despite how real these androids seem these are just toys programmed for paying customers pleasure. We know this and yet our sympathies lie squarely with the machines from the opening moments.
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