Nordic Noir - Mammon

In a previous post I wrote about my love for Nordic Noir - the slow-paced, intricate, dark dramas coming out of Scandinavia.

https://steemit.com/entertainment/@mrpig/nordic-noir-recommendations

I recently caught up with Mammon parts 1 and 2. which were released in 2014 and 2016 and follow tenacious Norwegian reporter Peter Vergas as he attempts to penetrate the world of politics and organised crime. If you're in the UK (or have a VPN) you can watch them on the Channel 4 website.

Series 1 starts gets off to a great start. Five years after the suicide of his brother, Vergas and his sister in law receive a wetsuit and flippers and a mysterious instruction to go to a lake at a certain time. This they do, and are looking around in the lake when a car comes screaming off of the cliff and lands in the lake just next to them. Vergas drags the driver to the shore, whereupon he says the works 'Abraham' than shoots himself.

Unfortunately after this intriguing beginning Mammon Series 1 descends into a mess of red herrings, incidental characters and subplots, and when the final big baddie is revealed for who he really is I found I didn't remember seeing him in the first place.

Series 2 which recently won an Emmy is much tighter and better for it. The plotline is still pretty ludicrous but there is a decent cliffhanger at the end of each episode, and the characters are more clearly delineated. That said, there are still a number of places, particularly towards the end, when you find you have no idea what's going on, but that's more by design than accident this time.