The Bridge recap: season four, episode two – the hunt for Red October

Spoiler alert: This is for people watching The Bridge at BBC Two pace. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen episode two of the fourth series – and if you have seen further ahead, please do not post spoilers. You can read the previous recaps here.

So Saga survived, despite being assaulted during her walk of freedom from Ystad’s female clink. Was there ever really any doubt? Surely even The Bridge wouldn’t bump off its star in the opening episode of its final series, although some commentators have already floated the tantalising theory that Saga Norén really is no more and that the rest of the season will just be poor Henrik interacting with her ghost. (He does have previous when it comes to conjuring visions of absent loved ones.)

For now, let’s proceed on the assumption that the Saga, who is initially so resurgent in this second episode, is flesh and blood. After what seemed like a very brief period of recovery in hospital – “How are you feeling?” asked Henrik, his already sharp features even more pinched with love and concern; her brusque, uninflected response? “Fine.” – she tooled up for her return to active duty in a montage that would not have seemed out of place in an 80s action movie.

As the soundtrack cranked up to Muse levels of maximalism, Saga pulled on her leather trousers. She got back into that big coat. She strode into a dark garage and tore a dust sheet off her Porsche then burned rubber to a police firing range to undergo a Skyfall-esque evaluation under Linn’s watchful eye. In isolation, it all seemed extremely badass. But Saga’s usually reliable aim was a little off, laying breadcrumbs for the breakdown to come.

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Thanks to Henrik’s petitioning, Saga joined the Margrethe Thormod murder investigation in Copenhagen and arrived in full steamroller mode, immediately rearranging all the mugshots and info on the evidence wall to her liking. The only thing that seemed to throw her was top cop Lillian’s new hot-desking policy, apparently intended to inspire creativity. (“Objectivity and diligence are more important than creativity,” declares Saga.)

Henrik and his shifty partner Jonas had made little progress during Saga’s recuperation. The prime suspect remained Taariq Shirazi, the gay Iranian dissident due to be deported on Thormod’s authority. A handy tipoff meant Henrik and Saga apprehended him with surprising ease. His impassioned story – that the Danish immigration board head was secretly working against her own official decision and was in the process of securing him a new identity and money – seemed a little far-fetched but tallied with his meeting with Margrethe on the day of her death. The evidence on his smartphone, notably a tracking app programmed to track Thormod’s mobile, seemed to suggest a hidden agenda. Where did he get that phone? It was a gift, he says, from two young female pickpockets he had saved from a beating.

It sounds like a tall tale, but we know Shirazi is telling the truth. We witnessed the teen thieves working their scam in the opening scenes and saw one of them lift a silver smartphone from a bag. In fact, we are already likely a few steps ahead: why would we be spending screen time with these two street kids – who could be sisters, according to witness accounts – if not so that we could make some link between them and Henrik’s long-missing daughters?

Playing house with Saga and Henrik

Henrik giving Saga his spare house key while she is working the Thormod case seemed symbolic of something bigger about their relationship to him, even if she didn’t seem that jazzed at the prospect of living together on a more permanent basis. After sex, she scooped up her tablet to start browsing for flats.

Their new proximity to each other does recharge her interest in Henrik’s wife’s death, though, and she begins her own unofficial investigation. That involved going through Henrik’s own files and reinterviewing Alice’s friends to scope out whether she was unhappy in the marriage. All this emotional brusqueness and dogged tenacity feels like classic Saga, but she is also having anxiety attacks and upsetting visions while at the wheel, much to Henrik’s alarm. Has she come back to work too soon?

Patrik: tears of a clown

Another episode, another grisly killing. We were aware that typically hunky journalist Richard Dahlqvist had been poking around the Red October activist group. We’d also seen that his twin brother, Patrik, seemed to enjoy pretending to be him. What we didn’t know was that Patrik’s day job was as a hospital clown, delighting and terrifying kids in equal measure.

One of the twins is electrocuted while taking a nocturnal dip in Richard’s Jacuzzi, apparently while being filmed by a masked figure. But which one? “Richard” returns home and identifies the body as Patrik. But could these be the (crocodile) tears of a clown? Might Patrik – a part-time actor, essentially – have opportunistically decided to play the role of his brother permanently?

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What do we know?

As corroborated by the club owner Silas, Margrethe Thormod covertly met Shirazi on the day of her death but took a call and abruptly left, picked up by a big black car.

Lillian orders a dragnet to apprehend the two pickpockets, who swiped the smartphone Shirazi was found with, but they manage to slip the net.

Patrik Dahlqvist is found dead in his brother Richard’s outdoor Jacuzzi. While it was staged to look like an accident, the positioning of the body after death confirms it was murder. Richard was in text contact with Red October – the group suspected in Margrethe’s murder – so Saga and Henrik catch the case.

Lillian’s new plan is to use Richard’s phone to set up a meeting with Red October. (That plan is scuppered when Richard apparently does a runner.)

After being stonewalled by Saga and Henrik, Margrethe’s husband Niels makes a suspicious call to persons unknown and ends the episode with the crime scene photos – delivered in a big black car.

Thoughts and observations

• Jonas, his nose well and truly out of joint because of Saga’s arrival, proved a master of both active and passive aggression, moaning about “equality before competence” and bagging her preferred hot-desk.
  
• What to make of on-the-run-mother-and-son Sofie and Christoffer joining the far-flung Swedish community seemingly run by stern “you must be the best version of yourselves here” hippies? Is there a Red October connection?
  
• Saga almost threw up at the morgue. Was she just readjusting to her job or was this some heavy foreshadowing?
  
• The real villain of the piece is arguably the slimy restaurant owner who got a week’s free dishwashing out of Shirazi, then grassed to the cops to avoid paying him any wages. Bad boss.
  
• The Bridge is not a show big on laughs, but seeing a mugshot of Patrik in full clown makeup on the evidence wall was worthy of A Touch of Cloth.