UK Edition
Review
Fortitude: leaner Scandi drama could finally live up to promise - Series 2, Episode 1, review
Looking back at Fortitude’s debut two years ago, one wonders if the show’s creators perversely wish that it had received less publicity. Striving to keep up with the original programming of Netflix and Amazon, Sky threw record sums behind its brooding Scandi thriller, hiring A-listers such as Michael Gambon and Stanley Tucci to film on location in Iceland, and pulling headline-grabbing marketing stunts that included setting an eight-foot mechanical polar bear loose across London.
The industry expected a phenomenon. What it got was a decent drama that mirrored its central characters: likeable, good-hearted, but flawed. Set in the fictional town of Fortitude – a sleepy, mountainous outpost of Arctic Norway – the first series followed Sheriff Dan Andersen (Richard Dormer) and Governor Hildur Odegard (The Killing’s Sofie Gråbøl) as they investigated the murder of Christopher Eccleston’s short-lived professor. With more bodies piling up alongside the discovery of a festering mammoth corpse, intrigue was rarely in short supply, but nor were the plot holes, reels of clunky dialogue and storylines that stumbled around in the dark without purpose.
Thankfully, the second series is armed with a sharper blade. From its typically sumptuous opening panorama of shaded glaciers beneath a “blood aurora”, the first episode cuts away the fat to leave us with leaner, tastier action. Why, in a flashback to 1942, is a baby-killing cannibal weaving his way across the mountains? Where is the sheriff? And how will his covering officers cope after a decapitated drunk is found buried in the snow?
Gone are Gambon and Tucci, bumped off before last series’ finale; in come Ken Stott – a grumbling bureaucrat amusingly advising the governor to ditch Fortitude for a safer mainland town (“It has a cheese festival!”) – and Dennis Quaid, because the show can’t go on without at least one star for American audiences. Nonetheless, as a cavalier fisherman, the latter brings a welcome emotional gravitas to proceedings, with his affection for his sick wife (Michelle Fairley, of Game of Thrones fame) lending the episode its most touching scene.
When Fortitude falls too much into police procedural trappings, it can feel like Broadchurch in particularly woolly sheep's clothing. However, the early signs suggest that it is keen to build upon the elements of psychological horror – with a splash of Seventies exploitation gore – that best distinguish it from the catalogue of Danish crime serials already on the market. If it continues to walk this line on a tight leash, Sky may just have the blockbuster it was hoping for.