The first season of Nordic noir series, The Chestnut Man, was excellent. Not perfect – the ending was a bit over-the-top – but quite good. I’m a huge fan of Nordic noir and serial killer mysteries, and the show was plenty creepy, with lots of weird symbology and horrific murders. It reminded me a bit of True Detective.
More than anything, I really loved the two lead detectives and their chemistry. In Season 1, this chemistry was only really professional. They worked well together, supported each other once they got past the initial awkwardness of working with a new partner, and in the end they solved the case and stopped the killer. Spoilers ahead.
Danica Ćurčić plays Naia Thulin, a Danish police detective working in Copenhagen, though by Season 2 she’s moved to cyber-crime in order to achieve a better work-life balance for her daughter, Le (Liva Forsberg). Mikkel Boe Følsgaard plays Mark Hess, a Europol investigator who, in the first season, returns to Copenhagen and finds himself caught up in the mysterious killings.
There are some fun twists and turns along the way, and some deeply troubling revelations, and the season finale ends with lots of action that I found a little too Hollywood, but still enjoyable. At the very end of the season, Hess leaves. We learn in Season 2 that he and Naia had a relationship that lasted several months before he had to go, and that he pretty much went no-contact with both Naia and Le.
Understandably, Naia isn’t thrilled about this, so when he returns in Season 2 (to look after his brother whose alcoholism has him in an induced coma) there’s quite a bit of tension. Before we get to the meat of this post, I’d like to make one observation. It was a mistake to have Thulin and Hess a romantic pair. They worked really well as detective partners, but having an off-screen relationship between the two felt kind of cheap, and was used in the first half of Season 2 mostly to create some artificial tension and set up the big mid-season twist. If I had it my way, and could wave a magic wand and set things right with Season 2, I’d remove the romance altogether and just have them as partners who care about one another in a platonic way. Le could still view Hess as something of a father figure.
In any case, the big mid-season twist is what I’m here to decry. At the end of the third episode, there’s a really intense mass shooting at a family center where an estranged husband goes to effectively kidnap his wife while she’s meeting with social workers. Naia shows up after the man has already killed two police officers and two employees and confronts the husband, who has a hunting rifle and threatens to shoot his wife.
Thulin, despite having a pretty clear shot at this point, lowers her gun. Then, the wife breaks free, knocking the husband’s rifle out of the way. Thulin and the husband exchange gunfire and he escapes. As she runs outside after him, she staggers and realizes she’s been shot. It looks like a gut wound, or at least a lower abdomen wound, and honestly not like a “die in a few minutes” injury but, of course, when Hess arrives she’s covered in a sheet. Dead. They set this up and telegraphed it pretty strongly in two ways:
First, when they split up while at a suspect’s house, with her telling Hess to go visit his brother despite the fact that A) the suspect could be dangerous and B) they both know she’s being stalked by the serial killer. The last time they were at a suspect’s house and split up, in Season 1, Hess was trapped in a creepy pedo basement and could have died. This is a huge pet peeve of mine in detective shows. Do not go into dangerous situations alone unless you have no other choice!
Second, when they’re on the phone and she agrees to have dinner with him and it looks like their relationship might be rekindled. Right then I started to think something bad was going to happen, but even still I thought it would be her getting injured, not killed.
I think I swore at my TV at this point. I think shocking character deaths can work and do have a place in a lot of TV shows. In a show like Game Of Thrones or The Walking Dead, with sprawling casts and numerous seasons filled with zombies and other dangerous creatures, it would be crazy not to kill off some main characters.
But killing off one of the two protagonists in a detective show that’s only run two seasons is insane. I’ve been bothered by this kind of move in other shows as well. Unforgotten lost me completely at the end of Season 4. I just finished watching DCI Banks as well, and at the end of Season 5 a major character death almost made me stop watching – but there were only a couple episodes left, so I stuck with it till the end. In all three of these shows, all of which are murder mystery detective series, these deaths served no real purpose. They did not improve the show in any way. In all three, a female detective was killed. In DCI Banks and The Chestnut Man, this simply serves as motivation for their male partner to solve the case.
Still, Chestnut Man – titled “Hide and Seek” for the second season – is the most egregious of almost any TV show I’ve ever seen. Unforgotten made it four seasons before the absolutely shocking and totally pointless death. DCI Banks was in its fifth and final season. In both, I think they made the show objectively worse, but at least we had several seasons of story behind us. Killing off Naia in the middle of Season 2 is as good as saying “Nevermind, we don’t want to make this show anymore.”
For one thing, Naia was the main character. More so than Hess. She’s who we begin the show following and who we stick around to watch. Hess is a really interesting partner for her to work with. He’s so quiet and intense while she’s much more warm and relatable. They were great, contrasting personalities that worked well because of their differences (similar to Rust Cohle and Marty Hart). Killing Naia just means that Hess is the only remaining protagonist. He doesn’t work nearly as well as the sole lead, and I was instantly uninterested in the rest of the season, though I did finish it.
Unfortunately, the rest of the season was, as I suspected, not nearly as good without Naia. It didn’t help that the killer was so obvious. The trouble is that the show didn’t really introduce enough red herrings or other possible suspects, so the one character who didn’t quite fit in ended up standing out rather glaringly.
It also didn’t help that Hess was so ineffective in the final confrontation with the killer. He fought so hard at the end of Season 1, but at the end of Season 2 (after taking a pretty serious injury) he just runs away. I found this quite puzzling. If not for Marie (the mother of one of the victims who is a major secondary character in the season played by Sofie Gråbøl), Hess would be dead. (And don’t even get me started on the police charging Maria for killing the serial killer; what nonsense is this? She saved a police officer and herself in a very clear self-defense situation).
Both seasons have these very smart detectives doing very stupid things, which also bothers me, but I could forgive that because I enjoyed the characters and mysteries enough to look past it most of the time.
I haven’t read the books by Søren Sveistrup, but I do know from others that this isn’t what happens in the second novel. Why make such a huge change? Even if Ćurčić wanted to move on from the role (and I have no idea if that’s the case) they could have finished out the season with her character alive.
In any case, this went from a show I wanted to recommend to everyone as must-watch TV to a show that I’ve lost all interest in continuing if there is a Season 3. So much potential squandered over “shocking” the audience with a pointless and gratuitous death. I don’t want to be shocked. I want a good story with characters I find interesting and detectives with real chemistry, and a strong mystery to solve. The Chestnut Man, alas, is no longer a show I can recommend without massive caveats. C’est la vie.
P.S. I was trying to think of a show where a partner’s death actually does improve the detective story and the only one I can think of off the top of my head is River. But that’s a very clever twist on the whole idea and central to the plot. It doesn’t really count.
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