My sweetie and I have completed watching Season One of The Bridge a Swedish/Danish co-production television series about a mastermind criminal operating in both countries.
I first posted about this series a month ago before we completed watching the season and I can now give a more complete opinion on the show.
The bottom line is I liked it.
What started out as a lot of unconnected threads all wove together into a single plot that was an impressive example of large-scale writing. The nuanced nature of the plotting would have been impossible in a feature film making this story only suitable for a novel or television.
The acting is all very good. Most of the actors were unknown to me except for Kim Bodina as the Danish detective Martin Rohde who played a major character in the fantastic series Killing Eve but for the most part Sofia Helin as Swedish sleuth Saga Noren carries the series.
While the words Autism or ‘On the Spectrum’ are never mentioned in season one it is quite clear that the writers, producers, directors, and actor Sofia Helin deliberately portrayed Saga as a person on the autism spectrum. Importantly that never made the characters divergent neurological nature a center of focus or some sort of superpower that allowed her to see things that others did not, which is so often the case for characters of the type in mystery fiction, but rather allowed her difference to simply exist as part of the constellation of character traits that defined her. Her co-workers and her partner Martin are very aware that Saga is different, but it is never used as an overly dramatic point of conflict or praise it is simply who she is. She is neither childlike nor a savant but allowed to be a complete adult female character.
Anytime you are dealing with a mastermind criminal character you are departing from a reality that matches our world. Moriarty doesn’t exist and if you go into The Bridge suspending disbelief for that sort of fiction it is an entertaining, dramatic, and emotional ride with a very satisfying conclusion.
Sadly The Bridge still is not available to stream in the US we are able to watch it because I have a region free Blu-ray player and my sweetie-wife bought the UK Blu-rays.
