User reviews

This four-episode debut season of a crime drama from French TV delivers a solid mystery in an exotic setting - French Guyana. We meet Chloe (Stephane Caillard), a police officer banished to this post in the remote jungle setting of Cayenne for some unspecified act of insubordination. On her first day, she's partnered with veteran detective Dialo (Adama Niane), and sent to the site of a gruesome murder. They find a catamaran adrift up river with the bodies of two white do-gooders who were distributing educational materials to isolated villages. She learns many locals resent such seemingly benevolent acts. They are descended from African slaves the French imported, and believe those efforts will cause their children to abandon their own language and culture.

Even so, the crime appears to have been committed as some kind of religious ritual. The husband and wife weren't just killed. They were mutilated and posed with other objects in an excessively bloody manner. They also learn the couple had a young son who is missing. Unraveling all of this is fills the rest of the season. Chloe is smart and tough, but rather arrogant for one thrust into a new and different culture, showing little concern for local customs and key figures. The urgency of rescuing the child denies her the time than needed for a learning curve, even if she were less headstrong about the job. Dialo knows people in all segments of the populace. During their investigations, we learn that he's troubled by the possibility that this crime is part of a long pattern in the area involving child abductions for arcane purposes.

Four episodes is just about the right length for getting to know these characters, understanding their specific environs, and remaining engaged in this suspenseful plot. The story unfolds with a fair amount of action, and considerable explanation of how present attitudes and beliefs were shaped by the former colony's history. We learn the meaning and significance of Iskander as part of that. And even though Chloe initially seems like a bit of a jerk, we wind up thinking whatever she did to be sent there was probably a justifiable response to someone's abuse of authority.

The season is self-contained. No annoying cliff-hangers while waiting for Season 2.

The police belatedly realize the couple has a home, they were not living on the boat. The police go to the home and immediately begin a minute search of the bookshelves in the first room. They do not go through the house to see if it is empty. They do not turn on the lights. They do not search for the boy.

This is slow AND it is stupid.

The first episode was taut and gripping. It looked like this was going to be a great mini series despite some over-the-top interventions by the Chloe character. Then it all went haywire. A stabbed person is using a rowing machine after three weeks; they were stabbed five times, lol, in the belly. A day later the same person is dying from septicaemia in a sudden relapse. Voodoo cures them alongside medicinal plants. Now, if there really were such a product, the pharmaceutical companies would be falling over themselves to get their hands on such a powerful antibiotic.

In the final episode we are supposed to believe that the transference of souls from a sacrifice to a long-dead baby can actually happen if done as part of a magic rite. It really is too much.

The character of Chloe is not realistic. She tramples on long-established norms and protocols as a rookie in Cayenne. I don't believe that anyone at all, even someone as wilful as she is meant to be, would blunder into situations and upset procedures and conventions as she did.

I was hoping for so much more from this especially as it had the Arte branding. There were points of interest and I learnt things I hadn't known, much of them about the lawlessness of this French outpost and about trafficking from Brazil of naive young women.

The scenery was rather beautiful but the towns were depressing.

After the ending of Season One it's hard to see how there could be a second season but apparently there is one according to this site. I am in two minds as to whether I'll be watching it if I come across it.