When I started watching “The Fall” (2013-present, Netflix) I could hardly remember the names of the characters at the end of each episode. It was just The Killer (Jamie Dornan) and The Cop (Gillian Anderson). The early hook was watching The Killer – soon to be known as the Belfast Strangler — get away with breaking into women’s houses and sneaking out, and later sneaking in again and strangling them to death.
By the end of Season 3, which was released in September, I knew this as the saga of Paul Spector and Stella Gibson. What started off as a dark mood piece had become a detailed character portrait by the end of the 17th episode, which marks the end of the Spector saga, although the series might continue with a new case.
Season 3 isn’t as titillating as the first two seasons, which feature Paul’s killings, the impressive way he keeps his family and colleagues from realizing he is a killer (he’s a bereavement counselor by day), his manipulations of a teenage girl (Aisling Franciosi’s Katie), and the cat-and-mouse game between Paul and Stella. And it does indeed rank lower among voters on Rotten Tomatoes. But it certainly cashes in on the momentum of those early seasons as Gibson compiles a legal case against Paul.
In its portrayal of several typical TV sequences, “The Fall” puts other shows on notice for the way they skim over things. A good example comes at the start of the season, when Paul has surgery after being shot in the spleen at the end of Season 2. We get intensely detailed look at the surgery (although it stops short of being unwatchable), whereas other shows might’ve cut straight to the recovery.
This allows “The Fall” to achieve its reason for being – to get viewers to dwell on the way one’s limited perspective shapes one’s view of a person. We know Paul is the killer – we saw him commit the crimes – but we also understand how from the doctors’ and nurses’ point of view, he’s a patient in need of care. I especially enjoy his chats with his primary nurse, Kiera (Aisling Bea), who is curious to learn more about this man who allegedly murdered at least four people but seems incapable of it. With her Zooey Deschanel-like dark bangs, Kiera fits the profile of Paul’s victims, and we can’t help but wonder if – despite the fact that he’s in police custody – she’ll somehow be next.
Some TV shows require us to fill in gaps because they are poorly written, but “The Fall” has an engrossing slow-burn quality that wordlessly asks us to fill in gaps, such as the idea that this isn’t just a nurse-patient conversation, but perhaps it’s Paul sizing up his next victim. Or perhaps this post-operation Paul – who claims amnesia, with utter believability – is somehow separate from Paul the killer.
“The Fall” doesn’t only pull off this trick with Paul, but also with Katie. Her Season 3 arc mostly consists of her standing outside the hospital, hopelessly trying to find a way to get in to see Paul. Yet it’s compelling because of the momentum of previous seasons – and in no small part because we as viewers can relate to Katie’s twisted obsession on some level. The part of our brain that roots for Paul to get away with the murders – because he’s the protagonist of a TV show – is the same part that sympathizes with Katie.
Similarly, Bronagh Waugh, as Paul’s wife Sally Ann, carries scenes simply by looking haggard and numb; we infer that her mind is grappling with the fresh revelation that her husband is a killer, the fact that their daughter sees Paul as her whole world, and the charges of impeding a police investigation that have been leveled against her.
Anderson’s turn is impressive in light of her overall career. She’s the “X-Files’ ” iconic Scully, a role she resumed for six episodes this year, and yet I never for one moment confused investigator Gibson with investigator Scully. Sure, she’s blonde and British here, but Anderson also almost entirely eliminates the softer side of Scully to play this hard-ass woman in a man’s world.
While so much of “The Fall” plays as subtext, it does get textual (particularly in Season 2) around Gibson, who constantly grapples with the notion of what is typically male and typically female. She sleeps around in a stereotypical male fashion and understandably resents it when she’s accused of being unprofessional. In the second season, she cites a study that found men are afraid of women laughing at them, while women are afraid of men killing them. Often, it seems her opposition is not Paul Spector specifically, but her concept of an unrestrained male.
In Season 3, though, “The Fall” largely drops the gender studies and observes that everyone – boy or girl — who lacks a loving household as a child is likely to be a messed-up adult. Paul never knew his father, lost his mother to suicide, and – as the coup de grace in Season 3 — was raised in a church-based foster home where sexual abuse was built into the curriculum. Katie’s dad died in an accident. There’s something going on with Gibson’s upbringing, too, although the writers seem to be saving that for future seasons.
One could nitpick Season 3 and say Katie and Sally Ann are shunted aside too much, or that Paul’s amnesia isn’t tidily explained, or that we don’t get sufficient answers about Stella’s past; the show can be criticized for what it chooses to emphasize. But once it makes those choices, the scenes we get are hard to look away from – mostly in a good way.