Silence and Suffering (S03E01)

If this weren’t an episode of The Fall, it could have been a highly above-average episode of ER. It is still a first-class procedural, overwhelming viewers with information that they don’t need to know but which contributes to the realistic effect. We don’t follow the investigators at work, but the heroes who come after them – the hospital staff. Serious moral issues are still addressed (death vs. justice, providing aid no matter what the person lying before you on the operating table has perpetrated), Stella’s ambivalent relationship to Spector remains the centrepiece of the narrative, and the compactness of the narrative is still breathtaking (only the hallucinations with the hackneyed light at the end of the tunnel are somewhat off the mark). However, doubts are raised as to whether it wouldn’t have been better to end on a high note and whether the series’ creators were able to come up with a solid enough plot for another six hours of narrative. In this respect, the first episode, despite its high degree of suspense, comes off mainly as an effort to kill some time and it doesn’t tell us much about what will happen next or whether there is a reason to look forward to it other than the great directing, actors and bold feminist subtext (which is actually not negligible). (03/10/2016)