The Break (La Trêve) Season 2: The Broken Detective

Season 2 of The Break (La Trêve) - Belgian noir with a vengeance (in French with English subtitles, on Netflix) - was even better than the first, with a tighter story that made more sense in the end.  It was more grim, far darker, which is saying a lot, since the first season was already on the grim side of grim.

Yoann Peeters is "broken," as he says close to the end of this new story.  He was broken when we first met him in the first season, escaping from the big city and the death of his wife to find some peace in his small hometown in the countryside.  Of course, he finds nothing like that, and the end of the first season leaves him more broken than ever.

He's escaped to the classroom - as a teacher - when the second season begins.  And he's inexorably drawn into a complex, harrowing case by a woman psychologist, Jasmina, who was his therapist in the past.  They also have something of a romantic spark.  One of her patients, Dany, has recently been released from prison after serving nine years for the murder of his girlfriend (that sentence seems a little light, but maybe Belgium and the U.S mete out sentences differently).  He's now accused of  killing an older woman in a brutal attack - he was her gardener - but Jasmina is convinced that Dany didn't do it, and is being railroaded into a confession, just as she believes happened with Dany for the first murder.  Add to that the local police, some of whom seem to have a vested interest in Dany being put away for the second murder as quickly as possible, and it's no wonder that Yoann is pulled out of his retirement into the new case.

But he's still broken.  His instincts are frayed and he has a tendency to switch his conclusion of who is the murderer as soon as new evidence comes through.   And there are suspects and evidence indeed.   Dany's brother Christian and his wife Sophie are high on the list, as are various people involved in an attempt to buy out the murder victim's property to build a road (good timing for us here in the US - reminded me of Trump's wanting to confiscate people's property to build his wall).  Some of the police themselves are not beyond being suspect for the crime, as is Yoann's daughter's girlfriend.

So Yoann the anti-hero has his hands full.  He has almost no one on his side except Jasmina, and even she might not have been telling him the entire truth.   I won't say anything more specific, but there are false starts, different kinds of villains, and all the stuff that makes the second season of La Trêve a grade-A whodunnit.  And the series is aptly named.  On one level, the break is Yoann trying to get away from big city police life.   On the deeper level, it's about the break in Yoann's persona, the breaks in his fractured mind. 

Back in the 1970s, I used to talk about what I termed the "defective detective" on American television - Longstreet was blind, Ironside in a wheel-chair, Barnaby Jones was old, and Columbo was a schlep.  The Break takes this to a whole new, frightening level, as Yoann (superbly acted by Yoann Blanc - all the acting is excellent) races against his disintegrating mind to find the truth.   Does he get there in time?

Binging the ten hours of The Break is well worth your time to find out.

See also The Break (La Trêve): Riveting Belgian Whodunnit, But