Adjö Wallander

I’ve just watched the last ever episode of Wallander… don’t worry I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that it was brilliant. It was powerful, moving – yes really moving, and came to a most satisfactory conclusion, a conclusion which has been unfolding from the first episode of this series. In that first episode there was a small incident which signalled everything that was to unfold. It was measured, paced, realistic, believable and tragic… without being sentimental or over-dramatic.

Just in case you don’t know Wallander, he is a character created by Henning Mankell in a series of detective novles. He has been played on TV in the series I have just watched by the brilliant Swedish actor Krister Henriksson, and in another series by Rolf Lassgård and in a BBC version by Kenneth Branagh. As with most  police procedurals, whether on TV or in fiction,  there is a subsidiary story-line about Wallander’s personal and private life, his relationship with his father and his daughter, and with some of the other officers as well. In this last series, his personal problems run parallel to the investigations he is conducting, because they so drastically and dramatically impinge on his work, affecting his judgement and his abilities… However, he still manages to solve the cases, and even in this final story where he is really struggling, his strong personality, decency and determination see him through to the end.

I have written before about the importance of endings, whether it is in a novel or whether it is on film; the audience don’t want to feel cheated, they don’t want to have engaged with a work, maybe for a long time in the case of a book or a TV series, and then feel as if the author/writer/director is just fed up and has sought an easy way to conclude what they don’t want to do any more. I’ve said before that I can accept the death or end of a favourite character if it fits in with the sense of the work, but an arbitrary end just to conclude what the creator is now bored with is cheating.

I did wonder how Wallander would end; it was clearly flagged up that the ending would really be the end, and there would be no miraculous Reichenbach Falls return due to public demand…. But what would the no-return ending be? There were guns waved around in dark buildings, there were snow-covered and isolated beaches, there were high cliffs with slippery edges…  This series has always seemed realistic – as realistic as such a series can be where there is such a high murder rate in a tiny Swedish town, and so it was that the end was completely believable, very sad, but believable. Goodbyes were said, and the future of the characters was indicated, even though we won’t share it.

Brilliant, totally brilliant!

Mankell’s Wallander books:

1. The Pyramid
2. Faceless Killers
3. The Dogs of Riga
4. The White Lioness
5.  The Man Who Smiled
6. Sidetracked
7.  The Fifth Woman
8. One Step Behind
9. Firewall
10. Before the Frost
11. The Grave/The Hand
12. The Troubled Man