Tak fur Kaffe - Review for Arne Dahl - The Complete Second Season

Introduction

Nordic Noir has taken off in a big way. The Killing, Unit One, The Bridge, Borgen and several more examples have been broadcast and/or remade for the UK market in recent years.

Regarded as one of the finest literary crime writers in Scandinavia, celebrated author, critic and editor Jan Arnald is the man behind the bestselling Intercrime series, written under the pen name of Arne Dahl.



The first five novels in the Intercrime series were been adapted for TV as the first series of “Arne Dahl”. The last five novels became the second series, presented here.

The “A Unit” has been disbanded for the last two years. When a wave of brutal murders connects several Polish nurses in Sweden, the powers that be seize their chance to reinstate the unit. Kerstin Holm, previously a member of the A Unit, is assigned to lead them.

The A Unit’s official role in the police force is to investigate complex, violent crimes with international connections. Kerstin builds her team with former members of the unit - Nyberg, Chavez, Svenhagen and Soderstedt, and she is assigned a new recruit, Ida Jankowicz, a wiry, yet powerful rookie with exceptional language skills.



Paul Hjelm, another former member of the team, has been promoted to a job as head of Internal Affairs. At first, he and the A Unit are pretty far removed from each other, but their paths will cross sooner than any of them could imagine.

We meet a chastened unit of individuals who have allowed the all consuming nature of their police work to eat away at their private lives. Demands and expectations have never been higher and a cold wind blows through the corridors at the National Police headquarters. Can Kerstin get the unit to deliver again or is this new effort a misguided attempt by a paranoid police force in a time of increasingly unusual and refined criminal activity?



This series was first broadcast on BBC Four in late 2015.

Video + Audio

An acceptable 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, as first broadcast. We also get a DD5.1 Swedish soundtrack, which is all fine. Much like Unit One, they do seem to favour some slightly moody baritone guitar in their incidental music.

Extra Features

Nothing here.

Conclusion

Another nice little piece of Nordic crime storytelling. I enjoyed the first series of this a lot, so it was great to return to familiar characters, and pick up their stories. It’s been a while since I watched the first series, but things soon come flooding back. And that handy narrative device of having a new character in the show who might just need to get a bit of background on her new team mates in the opening episode was rather useful.

Each episode is just under an hour, and they are well paced, with each two part story working well, alongside longer narrative arcs that play out through the series. There are a few weaknesses here and there, the “cybercrime” story features a cheesey scene reminiscent of Swordfish with some poor representation of hacking, but that’s just a personal bugbear.



Recommended for all you “Nordic noir” fans out there, a great little series of stories.