Marcella 3: Nordic Noir on a Whole New Split Level

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.

Marcella II: Noir, with a Vengeance

Marcella - billed as Nordic Noir in English - is back with a vengeance in its second season on Netflix.  Which is to say, it is at least twice as dark, brutal, and violent as its first noir-season, which I reviewed here last year.

The denouement of the non-Marcella story - that is, the murders which she and her team are investigating, which don't personally involve Marcella - was sufficiently harrowing.  And it actually did personally involve Marcella at the end, since her son came razor close - or actually via something other than a razor - to becoming a victim.  The villain - a woman traumatized by the death of a friend when they were younger, to lobotomize kids to make sure they don't do horrible things when they grow up - was somewhat familiar (not the character but that kind of motivation), or something we've seen the likes of on shows like Criminal Minds.  But the way our narrative gets there, with all kinds of twists and turns and unexpected deaths and lives ruined, was fresh and shocking.

The Marcella story - that is, the story of why she is having her blackouts - was barely developed until the non-Marcella story was resolved, but once it became center stage, in the last episode, its progress and resolution was about as grim as it gets.  Marcella under hypnosis remembers that she was responsible for the death of her baby, which she shook too hard in an effort to quiet the baby.  At least, that's what Marcella remembers - or thinks she remembers - but it wasn't 100% clear on the screen that Marcella's shaking of her baby actually killed her.

The immediate aftermath of this revelation was sheer adrenalin.  Marcella draws on a technique we saw in first season - DNA swapping (we saw several themes from the first season well woven into the second) - to fake her death, and join some other branch of British law enforcement.  This leaves more than enough room for a third season - which would be welcome to see, if only because Marcella would able to work without her black-outs.

Tour-de-force acting by Anna Friel in the title role, and memorable acting by just about everyone on screen.  Count on me being back here a review of the third season next year, or whenever it's aired.

See also Marcella (I): Offbeat and Compelling

Marcella: Offbeat and Compelling

We live-streamed Marcella on Netflix the past week, mostly in the wee hours of the morning, after watching the Presidential conventions.   It was certainly more appealing than the GOP convention last week, but that's faint praise indeed.

In its own right, Marcella is an off-beat and compelling story about the a woman who returns to the Metropolitan Police in London to help with a case that's all-too-familiar.   This happens at the same time as her husband leaves her for a blonde business executive, and then things get really interesting when she's murdered.

But here's what really sets Marcella apart as a noir police procedural: she's suffering black-outs, due to stress, and these (of course) occur at crucial times in her life  and in the investigation.  So much so, that she begins to suspect herself as the killer of her husband's lover.

Black-outs are a great trope in fiction, especially in detective stories, and even more so if it's the detective who's suffering the blackouts.   I did in this in one of my Phil D'Amato novels - The Consciousness Plague - and it adds an underlying uneasiness and uncertainty to everything in the story, which is just what you want in a serial murder narrative.

But Marcella takes this to a new level, since the serial murders themselves make no sense, and, in addition to her black-outs, she comes out of one of them with blood on her hands, literally.  I won't spoil the ending for you, but it's good indeed, conclusive in one sense but intriguingly ambiguous in another.

Anna Friel does a memorable job in the title role, the supporting cast is strong, and I'm looking for season 2 to be announced.