The Vast Abyss

I'm not a big watcher of crime dramas but this one caught my eye as it was quite high profile, starred Gillian Anderson and was set in Belfast. The plots sees Stella Gibson transfer from the Met to the PSNI to conduct a case review of a murder with possible links to the son of a leading politician. Once in place she begins to suspect that this killing is linked to others and that a serial killer is behind them. While she thinks this, family man and grief counselor Paul Spector is planning his next victim – another in a line of young professional women to be killed and posed. While the two continue their own paths, other complications add for both whether it be amorous babysitters, sectarian killings or political connections.

Just worth saying to those starting this show – it is not a complete story as a season and you will not have an "ending" if that is what you are looking at. I guess if you really enjoy it then this is good news but personally I didn't care for how open it was at the end. The issue for me was that the show clearly has its roots in British drama such as Prime Suspect but also appears to be influenced by the Scandinavian thrillers doing so well at the moment. Perhaps as a result it moves very slowly, very coldly and deliberately. Now, slow progression of narrative I do not mind but this frequently felt slow for the sake of, not because it was packed with detail and subtext. Even though I was interested, this pace did test my opinion and it is even harder not to see it as deliberate because it speeds up in the final episode in a half. This achieves the goal of having a strong close to the season and meaning most people will return for the second season, but it did annoy a bit in terms of how it made the rest of it look.

As a story the structure is good and I liked the dual-threads device even though it didn't quite work. One of the problems is that Stella is hard to like – or worse, hard to be interested in, I don't need to like her character but she is so cold, so distant as a character that I found her quite dull – a problem for the lead character. She is supported by more lively characters who all engage in the main thread and other asides, but too often these asides don't go anywhere and it is frustrating – particularly when you realize that most of what you are watching is not about this season, but about setting up another. I understand a show cannot do everything in one go and it is sensible to play it out longer, but the problem is that it felt like this is primarily what it is doing and it was neglecting the "now" in some ways. The threads with the killer Paul are better and I found him more interesting and the show was better when on him.

The delivery of the show is deliberate but the killings, although mostly bloodless are still pretty brutal in their intensity. In terms of the setting, I am not sure why Belfast was chosen and, although I liked that it was, it is a very muted Belfast – accents are toned down and the political background is there for color rather than ingrained. I understand why this is the case – the Belfast accent is not the easiest and there is no point of putting of viewers by preventing them understanding the dialogue, but still. Anderson is a good bit of casting in terms of her name, but her performance is too distant, too cold. I understand she is trying to play clinical and strong, but she overdoes it to the detriment of the character and her scenes. Dornan is much better and delivers much more of interest. Support is mostly decent with turns from McGrady, Lynch, McElhatton and others, making it more annoying that Anderson leaves such a hole at the core.

The Fall is a good start but overdoes its clinical patience, setting up too much for another season and not always doing enough for the "now". It is engaging as a whole and I will return for the second season (hopefully the conclusion of this story, if not the series) but I hope that it warms up a bit, does more to justify the slower pace and that Anderson can find a way to be slightly clinical and distant without being totally cold and distant to the viewer.

It's crunch time, Spector gets to see Stella in the flesh and is of course fascinated by her, but he knows that The Police are drawing in on him.

It is difficult to review this one, as an end of series finale it's a little disappointing, in the context of the show as a whole it's excellent.

When it first went out I can remember myself and my family saying it was a nothing ending, that absolutely nothing was resolved, you really do need to invest your time in the show as a whole, if you're happy to, then this episode is excellent.

It all comes down to the telephone conversation, watching Stella turn the tables on Paul is a wonderful moment, the look on his face as she explains exactly what she thinks of him, it's a terrific scene.

I take the point that it really does serve as a pre cursor to Series two.

Very intense, incredibly well answered, no answers to the questions as yet. 7/10.

I started watching "The Fall" for two reasons: 1. As a huge X-Files fan, the work of Gillian Anderson is always kind of on my radar; & 2. It seemed to get very solid critical reviews/scores. Unfortunately, I will be bowing out after this first season. The reason? While perhaps espousing an interesting setup for a police procedural, I felt that the show was so often under-acted and sparsely directed that it became boring more times than not.

The basic setup for "The Fall" is that Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) is a serial killer who preys on a certain type of woman. He stalks them, captures them, and displays their bodies when finished with them. He then goes back to his wife and child at home. With the local police department unable to make any progress into the case, special investigator Stella Gibson (Anderson) is brought in to help catch the murderer.

I can easily see the two areas in which "The Fall" was supposed to stand out from its peers, but I felt that both of those areas were letdowns for me

The whole "serial killer with a family" motif. I feel like that concept has been done before, and Dornan either doesn't do a good enough job or isn't written in a way that is conducive to the part. While with his family he is extremely quiet, cold, and aloof, to the point where I wasn't able to "buy in" to the notion that he could ever be a normal family man. Also, never (in this first season, at least) are we given any motivation as to why Paul kills like he does. It just happens. Perhaps more explanations are coming, but for now it is frustrating being lost in terms of motive.

Police corruption & a female leading the force. When Dornan's character isn't the center of the action or investigation, the show deals quite a bit with the corruption of the police force and the new leadership provided by Stella. To me, much of the dialogue surrounding these topics feels forced and shoe-horned in (from time to time, Stella will give a speech about women's leadership that seems to come out of nowhere). The writers try to give Stella conflicts of her own (not making her a God-like figure in terms of morality/authority), but none of them really resonated with me during these five episodes. Like I said, much of this seemed forced.

As such, my journey with "The Fall" is going to end after these initial episodes, as the show has generated no desire in me to continue watching. I don't care enough about Paul's motives (and that promises to be a very deliberate process if touched on at all), while Anderson's Stella just isn't doing it for me in terms of either her investigative prowess or personal hardships. Perhaps hard-core fans of police procedurals will like this one more than me, but I was looking for more obvious drama or character development and wasn't seeing it much, if at all.