Last weekend I stayed up late watching The Fall, a BBC program that I had been dying to see (no pun intended).
The murder of a young woman has the police in Belfast
stumped so they call in DSI Stella Gibson from the Met in London who quickly
sees connections between this murder and prior one. The police at first are
reluctant to agree (this might mean they messed up) yet when a similar
murder occurs it becomes apparent that they have a serial killer on their hands,
one who stalks and preys on young career women. Gibson takes over the investigation and sets about
drawing the murderer out before he can kill again.
The main reason I was excited for The Fall is that Gillian Anderson plays Gibson. Yes, Dana Scully of
the X-Files is once again donning a lanyard and
carrying a gun. I don’t mean to sound glib. Anderson is a fantastic
actress. It’s just hard not to think of Scully when she’s in a police tale,
especially when she visits the morgue.
Gibson is a type of character popular in mysteries: the
single female detective who is intelligent, attractive, lives alone, and
appears to need nothing but her job save for the occasional one night stand.
It’s been done many times before (think Cordelia Grey in the PD James novels or
DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect as
a couple of classic examples), and you can now add Anderson’s Gibson to the
list.
A good detective and leader, Gibson manages to run a team
smoothly. She gives commands without raising her voice, holds her own with the
men, and supports the career advances of younger female officers. She is utterly
devoted to a case. She lives the job, drinking too much coffee, changing in the
women’s room, and even spending some nights on a cot in her office.
She is also attractive and uses it to her advantage,
lowering her voice and speaking softly, flipping her long blonde hair, and
wearing shirts that almost reveal too much. In fact, her wardrobe is one of the
standouts on the show: silk shirts with black pencil skirts and trousers, heels
and tailored coats. She always appears put together, a bit posh. It’s only
in the close-ups that she allows the fatigue she’s feeling to show in her eyes.
And Gibson is used to getting what she wants. Spotting a
good-looking police officer, she asks to be introduced and almost immediately
tells him where she’s staying and her room number. For her it’s sex with no
strings attached, something that she refers to as “sweet night,” a term
borrowed from an African tribe. Gibson knows this because her first degree was
in anthropology, one of the few personal details she reveals about herself.
The other cast members are stellar including Jamie
Dornan as Paul Spector, a family man and grief counsellor who happens to be a serial killer, John Lynch as ACC Jim
Burns who has a history with Gibson, and Niamh McGready as Danielle Ferrington, the young patrol
officer who becomes Gibson’s right hand woman.
All five episodes are streaming now on Netflix and the BBC
has commissioned a second season (yay!). Watch them all but a word of advice: start your viewing early in the evening,
as you’ll want to blast right through all five.
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