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This is a rather graphic presentation of the horrors of Alzheimer's disease. Kurt Wallander has been slipping away. Most of his colleagues and the people around him are clueless, although they suspect he is ill. The case he is trying to solve the murder of a police officer. The officer's partner has pretty much gone rogue. She accosts one she suspects and locks him up in a large wooden crate. She threatens him because she believes what happened was caused by someone higher up. Wallander is in and out, his memory failing, his resolve slipping. He becomes so frustrated that he alienates Linda, who has done everything she can to cover for him. Hanging over this entire episode is the terror he feels at his loss of control. I have known numerous people who have succumbed to Alzheimer's, including members of my family. It must be so hard to see things disappearing in your brain. Maybe some would rather ignore the human side of this series, but I felt there was a sincerity and reality here that trumps the normal plot line.

I was a bit sad, when I realized that Kurt Wallander was hit by Alzheimers. As I thought this meant the end of him as crime investigator. On top of this the whole unit in Ystad was threatened on its existence. It did survive, however, and Kurt has a daughter, so a continuation of the Wallander series is not quite impossible, but it will not be the same. In England they continued the legendary Morse series with his sidekick Lewis, maintaining the low key British detection tradition, which also was apparent in the Wallander series, much to my liking. Many of the episodes were not outstanding, but the series all together painted a sympathetic picture of the atmosphere from southern Sweden, so it was with pleasure and anticipation I renewed acquaintance with Wallander when new seasons appeared. Henning Mankell has accomplished a fine job putting the initial episodes together from which the rest of the series sprang. If episode 32 is the end, Wallander will be missed.