The third season of Marcella just started streaming a few days ago on Netflix. It's more tightly plotted than the first two seasons, at times as intricate as the Godfather trilogy, and I'd say the best Marcella so far.
Most of the time, Marcella isn't Marcella. She's Keira, and she's embedded herself with a potent mob family in Belfast. But embedded isn't quite the right word, because Marcella has actually become Keira. She believes herself more than pretends to be Keira. This fits in well with the tenuous grip Marcella has on sanity in her prior two seasons on television.
The mob family she's now part of, to the point of eventually almost running, is a nice piece of narrative work. The matriarch is still the boss, but she's getting competition from both of her sons. Finn's the more usually violent and prone to think he's really running the family. Keira's pretty comfortably and literally in bed with him. Rory has the brains, is a bit of a nutcase, and wouldn't mind Keira in his bed, either. Keira may well be open to that, too.
Meanwhile, Marcella's handler thinks he can keep Marcella/Keira on the razor's edge of being thoroughly a part of the mobster family but ultimately still undercover police, too. There have been a fair number of cop shows over the years in which a deep undercover agent struggles to hold on to her or his real identity. But none were quite as powerful as Marcella/Keira in this third season of the show.
The plot turns are jolting, i.e. great to see, and the ending is one of the best I've seen of any police series, period. Anna Friel is better than ever in the title role, which is to say punch-in-the-gut compelling in every emotional twist and turn her complex double-identity requires. I haven't seen most of the other actors before, but they were excellent, too. Marcella 3 is an all together superb, eminently bingeable season, and lifts Hans Rosenfeldt's British Nordic Noir to a whole new split level.
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