1. The twist untwist. Sorry, I don’t know what else to call it, but what sets The Fall apart from other crime dramas is that there is no “whodunit” aspect to the storyline. Though the police are currently searching for the killer of successful architect Alice Monroe, the audience knows right from the get-go that it’s Paul Spector, a nice looking man who is introduced breaking into another young woman’s house in order to rifle through her underwear and arrange it on her bed. Over the course of the first episode we see him stalk Sarah Kay, his next would-be victim, well before the investigative team are aware that a serial killer is on the loose.
What does this mean for the story? You might think that revealing the identity of the killer would only rob the show of any and all suspense – but in exposing Paul’s activities to the audience, the storyline takes on a unique perspective. All the usual tropes of crime dramas are absent: there is no range of suspects that the viewer has to sift through in search of the killer, no assortment of clues and red herrings to pick apart. Instead everything is laid bare right from the beginning.
What this provides is insight into the life of a serial killer that not only runs parallel with the police investigation, but the other lives that Paul touches.
As it transpires, the most interesting thing about Paul Spector’s life is that it’s entirely uninteresting. The only reason we are captivated by his scenes is because we know what those around him do not: that by night he’s out stalking innocent women. Without this awareness, his story would be an utterly ho-hum drama about a rather dull man – but I’ll have more on this in a bit.
2. Gillian Anderson as Stella Gibson. Yeah, you already know coming into this that Gillian is going to be awesome. But she brings a rather extraordinary demeanour to Stella that’s fascinating to behold. To start with I was quite surprised by just how cold Stella was, almost to the point of finding her difficult to empathise with. This level of detached calm on a male character would either be considered normal or demonstrative of his commitment to the job, but on a female character it’s rather unnerving.
What becomes clear over the course of the episodes is that Stella is totally, utterly, indescribably unapologetic about who she is and what she wants. Whether it’s in her professional or private life, chasing leads or propositioning a co-worker for a one-night-stand, she’s completely self-possessed.
The writing doesn’t seem particularly interested in giving her any clichéd “flaws” just to give her obstacles to surmount (let’s be honest here, on most other shows the temptation to make their female lead an ex-drug addict or socially inept or the recovering victim of domestic abuse or hobbled by rampant misogyny in the work-place is usually too great to ignore); instead Stella is allowed to handle the case and her sex life with complete autonomy. No slip-ups. No attempt to “take her down a peg.” No personal demons that threaten to overwhelm her.
She’s in charge and she’s practically infallible. And why shouldn’t she be? It’s awesome.
In the words of writer Allan Cubitt: TV detectives are sometimes more a collection of tics or character traits than living, breathing individuals – mavericks who break the rules (thereby destroying, in reality, any possibility of getting a conviction), drunks trapped in a bad marriage with a troubled teen child, and so on. I believe character is revealed through action. For Gibson, I decided I would tell the audience next to nothing about her private life, but let them learn about her little by little via the choices she makes. The actor who plays her, Gillian Anderson, was fully behind that as an idea. She wanted to keep Gibson as enigmatic as possible. That only works if you have an utterly compelling performer, and Gillian is remarkable at conveying depth of thought in any situation.
3. Everyone else. Though we have our hero and her adversary in Stella and Spector, the truth is there’s no central protagonist to The Fall. This is very much an ensemble piece in which even the minor characters pack quite a punch. The victims, the victim’s families, the police officers, the reporters, the other suspects – they’re all fleshed out to a surprising extent in a very brief period of time.
Paul’s family for example, whose interactions with him would feel like typical domestic fluff were it not for the fact that we know that they don’t know that he’s a serial killer. His wife Sally is a neonatal nurse whose interactions with a teenage girl and her dying infant daughter seems utterly incidental to the plot involving her husband’s activities – at least until the chilling moment in which she suggests that they wash, dress and take photographs of the baby. It provides an unmistakable (though totally ignorant on her behalf) reflection of Paul’s similar undertakings with his murder victims.
Then there’s Paul and Sally’s daughter Olivia. She suffers from night-terrors and draws pictures of princesses stabbing themselves – so what’s really going on in her head? Has she seen her father do something suspicious? Is she just intuiting his evil intentions (especially since he stashes his equipment in the ceiling of her room)? Or is she another sociopath-in-the-making? The show leaves it ambiguous...for now at least.
But my favourite sequence would have to be an emergency services call that’s shot entirely from the operator’s point of view. She talks to the devastated caller over the course of a few minutes, remaining calm and empathetic, then on hearing that the police have arrived at the house, ends the call and immediately moves onto the next one. That’s the first and last we see of her, but it paints an exceptional picture of her life and the work that she does.
There are dozens of these vignettes over the course of the five episodes, and though some are bound to interest you more than others (personally I wasn’t all that involved in the storyline concerning police corruption), they’re all interconnected, and all paint a vivid picture of the show’s setting. Which brings us to...
4. Belfast. The setting makes for some rich interplay between characters and environment. As is pointed out to Stella early on, policing in this city is both political and religious. The PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) is portrayed as passionately devout yet often corrupt, involved in anything from extra-marital affairs to prostitution rings and drug-dealing. Emotions run high in the police headquarters, not helped by a memorial plaque on the wall dedicated to those murdered in the line of duty. Not killed, but murdered.
This attitude spills out into the streets, where not even a simple arrest can be made or a murder scene investigated without an angry mob showing up to hurl things at the police. This is a tense environment on many levels, and that soaks into the entire atmosphere of the story.
5. The female characters. They’re fantastic – separately or together. There’s Stella of course, a woman who is so comfortable in both her abilities and her own skin that it makes some of her male co-workers visibly uncomfortable. She reminds me a bit of Elise Wasserman in The Tunnel, who also solicits “no strings attached” sex from an attractive male, only to find that he had different ideas about what their relationship encompassed – the key difference being that Elise’s forwardness in sexual matters is implied to be a result of her unspecified Asperger’s Syndrome, whereas Stella knows exactly what she’s doing and remains unapologetic about it.
A quintessential scene is when she picks up a judgmental vibe from one of her colleagues on learning she had a one-night-stand, and delivers this little gem:
Man fucks woman. Subject “man”; verb “fucks”; object “woman”. That’s okay. Woman fucks man. “Woman” subject; “man”, object. That’s not so comfortable for you, is it?
Just to top it off, the man she’s saying this to soon finds himself in a traumatic situation that Stella calmly deals with – which he later thanks her for.
But Stella’s most important relationships are with two other principal female characters – Danielle Ferrington, a young police constable (and lesbian) that she takes under wing after being impressed by her integrity, and Reed Smith, the pathological who she relates to on a professional level. Needless to say, the show passes the Bechdel Test in all directions, allowing the women to talk to each other about personal and professional issues.
Even the female murder victims, that quintessential component of any crime drama, are fleshed out so that their deaths don’t feel perfunctory, but genuinely tragic. This is particularly true of Sarah Kay, the young solicitor that Paul stalks for several days before killing her, and whose life, passions, relationships and dreams are explored before the murder occurs.
There are so many great scenes involving the ladies, especially those that underline a real sense of female solidarity at work: Reed gently telling Stella that her pushy demeanour at the hospital will not get them what they want, Danielle feeling overwhelming guilt and remorse over not taking Sarah’s initial call for help seriously, the media liaison who pats Stella on the back for a job well-done and is visibly worried about her temporary wardrobe malfunction, Sally staying by the side of the young teen mum as her infant daughter slowly dies, and Stella listing the names of Spector’s murder victims to him over the phone, informing him that it’s because of them that she’ll never stop hunting him.
Everywhere I look I seem to see demands for female-led dramas with a female supporting cast. Well, here it is.
6. My favourite game, spot the famous British thespian! There's Gillian Anderson of course, but also Jamie Dornan who is probably best known as playing Sheriff Graham on Once Upon a Time, the polar opposite of Paul Spector (and star of Fifty Shades of Grey, so enjoy his acting career while you still can). Archie Panjabi from The Good Wife plays Reed, and Game of Thrones fans will recognise Ian McElhinney and Michael McElhatton (who play Barristan Selmy and Roose Bolton respectively).
And the most amusing thing about Colin Morgan joining the cast is that his girlfriend and father from Merlin have already featured on the show (Laura Donnelly who played Freya and John Lynch who played Balinor). There's also Aisling Franciosi who played opposite him in Quirke, and whose character somehow manages to be even more homicidally stupid here than she was there.
7. The Not So Different trope. Yeah, you’ve heard this one before. In an attempt to unsettle our hero, the villain gives a dastardly speech that ends with a declaration that the two of them “aren’t so different.” It’s meant to spook the good guys, but quite often provides an illuminating look at both of them, contrasting and comparing their methods and motivations (consider Harry Potter and Voldemort or Merlin and Morgana, for example – they were on different sides, but their background and tactics were strikingly similar).
Here Stella is the detective and Spector is the killer, but both engage in what Stella calls “doubling” – that is, having a secret life hidden by a persona that's used to interact with other people. But whereas Stella’s veneer is cold and intimidating, Spector’s is warm and inviting. At face value, he’s the more appealing figure.
There are other similarities between them: both care very little for the opinions and feelings of others (Stella is very blunt with her co-workers and is perfunctory when it comes to comforting the bereaved; Spector may be affectionate towards his family, but is certainly not above manipulating them for his own ends), both are frequently shown exercising (Stella swims, Spector does chin-ups), and both have a certain lack of emotion when it comes to trauma (Spector’s failings in this area are obvious, but Stella is surprisingly collected when she hears that her one-night-stand has been shot).
But of course, in the immortal words of Dumbledore, it is our choices that demonstrate who we truly are. For all her detachment, Stella is on the side of the angels, and in their phone-call confrontation, she takes Spector’s “not so different” spiel and slaps it back in his face.
8. Food for thought. Obviously you’re not going to sit down and watch a crime drama for the fun of it, but there is also a HUGE margin between a cosy Miss Marple murder and a Jack the Ripper special. The Fall veers more towards the latter, and is made even more unsettling by the intimate glimpse we get into the killer’s life. We don’t like to think that normal people can do horrific things – we think it’s the work of evil loners that lurk in the shadows.
And yet one of the most important things about the portrayal of Paul Spector (as I mentioned earlier) is that he’s boring. Were it not for the fact that we know he’s a serial killer, we’d have no interest in him whatsoever – and most of the “concern” we have is for his family. At times he seems to show depth of character: he offers comfort to a grieving mother and is horrified when he learns one of his victims was pregnant, but these moments of compassion – however contrived – only serve to heighten the sordidness of his crimes.
Sometimes a criminal can be portrayed as so clever, so charismatic, that a small part of us is secretly rooting for their success. Not here. Any dread we feel for his impending arrest is reserved solely for his family. And knowing who the killer is right from the start of the drama also helps keep Spector in that “boring bubble”. By knowing exactly who he, the mystique and glamour surrounding him is stripped away.
(Or to put it another way, I've found no trace of the Draco in Leather Pants phenomenon at work. Apparently a lot of people who would otherwise be lining up to redeem this poor misunderstood woobie in their fan-fiction have found there's nothing to work with here. Paul Spector may be handsome, but there's nothing even remotely interesting or appealing about him - and contextually, that's what makes this show so riveting).
Thanks, Rav, just found your site, and watching The Fall for the second time, and re-found this idea on the banality of evil: To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the Nazi war criminal’s actions stemmed from her well-known phrase “banality of evil,” not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss’s case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler.To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, “normal,” sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.
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