Fortitude review: New Sky thriller series set in Arctic town
The first episode of Sky's deafeningly-hyped Fortitude was a lumbering Frankenstein's monster, in which the random body parts of better, smarter TV shows were stitched together with little thought to aesthetics or coherence.
The tone was uneven, the pace frustratingly stop-start, the plot often baffling. And Christopher Ecclestone, billed as one of the stars, was apparently bumped off halfway through. A pity – the notoriously grumpy screen presence played one of the few empathic characters.
You could spot the influences several time-zones away. Part-filmed in Iceland, the gloomy midwinter setting evoked fashionable 'Nordic noir' fandangos such as Borgen and The Bridge. But Fortitude, with a reported £25 million budget, was also a small town drama – and, as is obligatory in such affairs, everyone had a dark secret (what a shock that the upstanding husband turned out to be cheating with the waitress down the road)
However, it was David Lynch's Twin Peaks that cast the heaviest shadow. Hints of the supernatural glimmered throughout – was the woolly mammoth relic which two miners had uncovered merely a jumble of bones or something more sinister? – and we were treated to several straight-up barking sequences, most bafflingly a pig squeezed into a CT-scan machine.
There was a lot of plot – arguably too much, so that it became difficult to keep up. In a gloomy Arctic community of 700, a potentially historic fossil find threatened to forestall a Vegas-style hotel-in-a-glacier. While this may have been good news for science – embodied by Ecclestone's upstanding Professor Stoddart prior to his hasty exit – it was a set-back for the residents of Fortitude. Led by stoic Mayor Odegard (Danish actress Sofie Gråbøl), they were counting on tourism to lift the settlement out of a looming depression (once the mines were exhausted, what reason has Fortitude to exist?).
Awkwardly, investigating Ecclestone's suspicious death – did anyone truly believe he was mauled by a bear? – fell to the Mayor's husband, Police Chief Anderssen (Richard Dormer with a strange Scandi/American accent). Across town, doting hubby Frank Sutter (Nicholas Pinnock) was, for his part, too busy conducting nude shenanigans with an obliging waitress to notice his feverish son climb through out a window and, after dashing about in sub-zero temperatures, develop frostbite (veteran Michael Gambon also wandered in and out, as an academic with a terminal illness).
Amid the visual and thematic murk, Fortitude was in constant danger of losing its way. Matters brightened as Stanley Tucci parachuted in as an American investigator dispatched by Scotland Yard to solve Professor Stoddart's possible-murder (why an American? Why Scotland Yard? Fortitude didn't feel like answering). From here the episode – the first of 12 – shape-shifted into a relatively conventional police procedural, Tucci and Dormer making for nicely hostile odd couple. When it settled for being just another cop show, Fortitude was perfectly watcheable. But its ambitions were far grander and that is where it fell down.
