When a television series has a really excellent first run, it's always an anxious wait to see if the follow-up will repeat the success. Quite often, it cannot help but fall short. Homeland is one of the more high profile casualties of this sequel sickness. Once an example of how to make gripping, politically astute drama without resorting to cliche, it became lost in a mire of Dana-based plot lines and Clare Danes cry-face memes.
The Fall is an interesting case study because it arrived in 2013 looking a lot like things we'd all seen before -- Silent Witness, Prime Suspect, The Killing -- and yet managed to do something new with the 'murder mystery' genre. It gave us our killer on a plate. Paul Spector, played by the unreasonably handsome Jamie Dornan, could not have been more unlikely (save, of course, his suspicious surname). Apparently devoted to his family, and highly respected as a grief counsellor (BBC does irony), he unleashed wells of sexual rage in a murder spree that lasted most of the first season. His targets, with one unplanned exception, were of a kind: young, attractive, female.
Following his traces throughout was D.S.I. Stella Gibson, a performance of icy composure from the magnificent Gillian Anderson. The psychology of Spector and Gibson's mutual obsession was the compelling centrepiece of a show tautly conceived and teasingly played out across five impeccable episodes. Both characters were evidently plagued by childhoods that remained (and still remain) only half-spoken. They also share a tendency to use their sexuality to manipulate others, each possessing an allure that disturbs and excites in equal measure. In another fictional set-up, theirs would be a love story, which, I'm sure, is the point.
Season 2 marks a change in pace and direction. The Belfast police now know that Spector is the killer, and most of the episodes revolve around his abduction of Rose Stagg (Valene Kane) and the subsequent rescue effort. Well, I say revolve, but one of the problems with this season is that it doesn't strictly revolve around anything. Side-plots sprawl from the main action in increasingly ludicrous number and content. Minor characters, whom we are led to believe are important, are introduced then hastily dropped. The dialogue veers between the mundane and the ridiculous. Fuseli's Nightmare becomes the focus of some pretty painful art history analysis. Oh, and Rose Stagg is all but forgotten for three whole episodes. I like to think abduction investigations are performed with a little more energy, particularly when the known culprit is taking a jog through the Botanic Gardens.
All this aside, The Fall could still have worked as a fairly entertaining and well-acted thriller. More difficult to swallow is its portrayal of women. I was initially ambivalent about criticisms of the show's gender politics. The first season was truly horrifying in its depiction of Spector's assaults on his defenceless victims, but it managed to serve a dramatic purpose without glamourising sexual violence. The second, however, shifts the balance perceptibly from representations of women as victims of masculine power, to the intricacies of feminine sexuality (these two issues are, of course, far from exclusive). It runs into problems because its approach to this topic is predictable and, at times, tasteless.
The first and worst example is Katy Benedetto (Aisling Franciosi), whose involvement in the whole affair is a travesty of storytelling. A teenager infatuated with Spector, she becomes increasingly embroiled in his twisted fantasies, first by offering herself to him, then by concocting alibis, briefly kidnapping his daughter, and breaking into his house. Whilst it is not impossible to believe that an otherwise apparently stable adolescent might conceivably risk so much for a man she thinks is a murderer, it is certainly difficult. It is made more difficult by the fact that the show's writers make little attempt to expose her motives, anxieties, or personal circumstances. There is also a highly disturbing scene in a hotel room where Spector ties her to the bed, a sequence the seedy hotel owner captures on his surveillance system. It is a scene overlaid with aggressive misogyny and male voyeurism, and Katy's apparent compliance, aside from being unbelievable, desperately needed to be further unpacked.
The other women, unfortunately, don't always fare much better. DC Gail McNally (Bronágh Taggart) is reduced to yet another one of Spector's fantasies, sent in to arrest him in his cell with her hair tumbling loosely over a thin blouse. Dr. Reed Smith, played by the wonderful Archie Panjabi, is seriously underused, save for a brief gay kiss with Gibson that has no purpose other than to titillate and ends in possibly the most cringe-worthy line of the season: 'I can't. I'm from Croydon.' Kalinda Sharma would never say that. And who knew sexuality was a postcode lottery? Even Gibson is rendered in more shallow terms this season. With some of the show's original urgency lost (Spector doesn't actually kill anyone this time), the glacial precision of Anderson's performance had less to counter, and sometimes meandered from the calm to the soporific.
This all sounds pretty damning, and I was disappointed by The Fall this time round. It ducks some of its responsibilities in terms of its treatment of gender and sexuality, and the plotting, at times, is nonsense. But given the strength of its opening season, my expectations were higher than usual, and it is still very watchable stuff. It just suffers from the maladies that so often afflict the follow-up. In an effort to recapture the old formula, shows sometimes get lost in manic methods of narration, and forget how to be curious about their characters.
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