A few years ago, my husband and I were hooked by the Danish/Swedish thriller, The Bridge. We watched Season One together, sitting on the sofa gripped by a story of increasingly gruesome violence. The two heroes at the centre were flawed but determined to get to the bottom of a baffling series of murders, and we, too, were committed to getting to the end of the drama.
Some nights as I walked up the stairs to bed I felt like I was winding my way from a marble amphitheatre through olive groves, leaving behind an ancient enactment that would carry us horror by horror to catharsis. Then we ran out of plot, and instead of relief, I felt revulsion. The villain appears out of nowhere in the last few episodes, tying all the dangling threads together. He was a hasty sketch, not a real person: a brilliant, damaged man out for revenge — a devil ex-machina, a cartoon figure. That was it for me and the Bridge. I left my husband to watch the rest of the series on his own.
I should have picked up a novel instead of a sleekly designed Scandi thriller. The writers were not really interested in character or delving into psychology; they just wanted to string us along with narrative tension, taking us for a ride. I fell for it. There was that one man whose character they did develop, only to axe him, brutally, in the final episodes.
