The Fall, Season Two (2014)

The closing scene of the first season of The Fall set things up for the second season to revolve around a confrontation between Paul Spector and Stella Gibson and to some extent that’s exactly what happened. When they sit down across from each other in the interrogation room after Spector’s arrest, it feels like the climax of the entire show and it’s a very suspenseful and dramatic moment. Both Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson are at the top of their game in this key scene and their long discussion gives the viewer an opportunity to process and try to make sense of everything that happened in the previous episodes and in particular to answer the question ‘Who is Paul Spector?’ So why would I have a problem with it? Mostly because I felt that organizing the drama around the relationship between the show’s two protagonists risked narrowing the focus on The Fall as a whole. After all, one of the things that stood out about the first season was the way in which Spector’s murders and sexual assaults were connected to other forms of male violence in a way that problematized any attempt to see Spector as an aberration with no relation to other ‘normal’ men. I was concerned that we might lose this broader scope through overemphasizing the Spector/Gibson antagonism. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about this as The Fall’s second season worked hard to maintain this aspect of the show. When Stella’s boss tried to force himself on her, when Jimmy Tyler tracked down his estranged wife at a women’s refuge and threatened to kill everyone there, when the paedophile priest who knew Spector as a boy was interviewed, and even when Spector’s ability to be a loving father was mentioned—all of these things made The Fall’s exploration of violence much more nuanced and complex than that of the vast majority of television crime series, even though it still comes nowhere near The Wire in this respect. With this context in mind, the fact that this season continued to show Stella Gibson as a sexually active professional woman reads somewhat differently than it might otherwise do. While I still have reservations about this aspect of Gibson’s character receiving so much attention, and while some examples of it came very close to pandering to the audience (for example, the scenes with Gibson and Reed Smith), I think it is important and commendable for a number of reasons. For example, in the context of a show where male hatred and fear of women play such a large role, it is crucial for Gibson’s character to be assertively sexual precisely because it tempts the audience to judge her in the same way some of the show’s characters do. Moreover, Gibson’s need for these types of physical and emotional connections tells the viewer something important about this character, and this is especially valuable information about a character that is usually rigidly controlled and gives very little away (indeed, if I have any criticism of Anderson’s amazing performance in this role, it’s that she sometimes comes close to emptying this character of all emotion in a way that makes her seem practically unresponsive). This is not to say that The Fall’s second season was perfect—far from it! To start off with, there are major parts of the plot left unresolved, most glaringly featuring the character of Katie Benedetto, who is problematically stereotypical character in all kinds of ways. Even though some of this lack of resolution can be explained away by the possibility of a third season, the fact is that the whole plotline of Benedetto becoming Spector’s disciple and partner in crime basically went nowhere and that was extremely frustrating. Then there’s the way in which the season ended. Trust me, I have no problem with cliffhangers, and I actually very much liked the fact that the show did not end with what would seem like the natural resolution of the action, i.e., Spector’s arrest. My problem was with the fact that Jimmy Tyler could walk right into the middle of an area that had supposedly been cordoned off by the police and apparently shoot Spector to death. I know, being annoyed by implausibility is the most conservative and banal reaction one could possibly have to a scene like this, but this is a police procedural and so generically speaking, plausibility matters and this was so egregiously implausible a development (upon which so much hinged) that it really bothered me. Anderson is reportedly keen for a third season to happen and I don’t blame her. Not only are there a lot of loose ends to tie up but one also feels that the surface of her character has only been scratched. For all its flaws, The Fall is still one of the most interesting shows on television today.