The Fall

[hollyisalovelyname]

Watched it last night. Tis good, but disturbing. Gillian Anderson very good. Jamie Dornan scary. Anyone else see it?

He disposed of the necklace down a drain while pretending to tie his shoelaces, Venus.

The extra jogging bit was filmed on belfast main shopping street

I recognised it

Missed a comma after pregnant, she isn't pregnant with 2 children! Pregnant plus 2 other children was what I meant!

Thanks BOF, missed that. I'm going to have to re-watch it all! Missed out in lots of little things :)

He dropped the necklace into a drain outside the police station.

I enjoyed this episode, but the one niggle throughout is that Paul still hasnt told his wife that he no longer has a car. I mean, its a pretty important thing to mention!!

Just watched it.

Thought this episode lost it a bit, just he's been portrayed one way throughout the series and now he's acting completely different.

However, in all, I enjoyed the series and the story ("enjoy" is the wrong wording with the subject matter though IYSWIM)

GA was good but again, her big eyes and mouth-slightly-agape acting in this last episode grated a bit.

I really like the fact there is no neat and tidy ending, I want to learn more about his background and why he's such a psycho murdering fuckwit.

Now, finally, was it just me or did anybody else pick up that when he was burning his car there was a flash back to the diary being read. What if the diary wasn't in the car, but in the loft still and the wife found it whilst packing for the holiday? Hence the look of fear when he stood behind her in the kitchen.

Can you also stop referring to GoT, I got rid of Sky last year so saw the ending of S2 and nothing since. I had Virgin installed last week, assumed I'd be able to get GoT on Sky 1 - epic fail, it's only available on Sky Atlantic, which isn't on Virgin!!!!

I don't think they're going to move it out of Belfast, for the next bit. Otherwise the Munroe storyline and the Olsen murder will be hard to thread in. Besides there's loads of character actors already in it. It was Belfast he was jogging in at the end.

I think they are just on holiday.

Yeah, he said something like "go to Scotland like we did when you were pregnant with Olivia"

See that's what I thought and then I saw the boxes in the kitchen and got a bit distracted

Good point about the car. What were they leaving in at the end? I suppose it could have been a taxi, but I don't remember seeing another driver.

Going back to the phone call with Stella, I thought it was interesting that he looked unnerved by her telling him she thought his name was Peter. Which means that even though that isn't the case, he has realised she must be onto him from episodes in his past, like the pathologist's student friend (when he wasn't wearing a mask) when he must have used that name.

Her car I assume.

I enjoyed overall, but I also agree with some of Aitch's points.

I don't think the writer cared a jot about portraying the victims as 3D people and think he's retrospectively said this to justify making a programme where women are assaulted and murdered. The level of detail attached to each victim was reminiscent of my GCSE drama lessons, where you were given 5 minutes to come up with a character and backstory for an improvisation session.

If they'd chopped out the seemingly pointless gangster plot (seriously, what is the purpose of it?) and spent that time filling in some of the plotholes and giving more screentime to each victim, maybe that would have been a better use of 60 minutes.

I really felt that the last 2 episodes were edited too tightly, like they'd shot 80 minutes and realised at the last minute that they had to cut loads (sorry, sure there's a better way of describing this!).

Not to take away from Jamie Dornan or Gillian Anderson, who were excellent and for a portrait-of-a-serial-killer programme, I did think it was a compelling watch.

Majorly pissed off with them making him a care-leaver though. Again: you've had 4 episodes where you have no background information about him and in the last 20 minutes, an offensive stereotypical 'shorthand' explanation about his fucked-uppedness.

That's a good point, MrsBert.

I assumed series two would be a new story rather a continuation. Hmmm. Where are they going to go with this? I think Paul has messed up to the extent that they are bound to catch him, but another series just on this case could be rather slow.

I found the actions of Paul's wife particularly unbelievable. She accused her husband of grooming the 15 year old child, yet chooses to continue to expose her children to such a person. And for all the other reasons which Imperialblether ( I think it was) posted above.

I'm undecided about this programme. I really liked GA's cool, über competent character but on the other hand I'm increasingly disturbed by the torture and mutilation of women being offered up as Sunday night prime time viewing (Ripper St I'm also glaring at you).

Am I exceptionally slow on the uptake to only just realise the significance of the surname Spector? I kept thinking of Phil Spector when it was mentioned and have only realised about 'spectre' on seeing it written down.

Monday night, to be fair.

I am still with Aitch on this. Exploitative rape fantasy dressed up with glossy production values. Alan Cubitt is being a tad disingenuous in that Guardian article. He made the choice to write about a serial killer who targets pretty middle class women with nice underwear and tortures and kills them in scenes that go on waay too long. Having GA make clanging speeches about misogyny doesn't the change the fact that the reason he made that choice is that people get off on dead naked women and he is just serving up more of what people want.

I mean, you wouldn't get a drama about a serial child killer being shot in this way, would you? So why is it supposedly less bad when it is women who are being murdered?

We don't really get to know the victims at all in any meaningful way. Cutting the sex scene with a murder is just grim and repeatedly toying with the idea of Stella in the place of victim (painting her nails, acting out the murder) is really rapey and undermining of her.

And how can Spector and wife (you see, I don't even know what her name is, that's how important the female characters are to the drama) just take off like that? They both have jobs, don't they? You'd have to book leave, or give notice.

I don't know if I can handle another six episodes.

Can someone PLEASE tell me how the connection was made between the attack on the path's friend from back in her student days was made to be the Musicman suspect?

A link made with such certainty that there was an efit done.

Tenuously Moin!

Ga profiled the killer and concluded he'd attempted to murder but failed, this spurred him on to up his game, get stronger and ensure he didn't fail next time.

As a result of this the Path made a connection to her friend who'd confided a sexually motivated assault that happened when she was a student.

When GA questioned the victim it became clear this was the same perpetrator.
Convenient or what!

Ok, so it was full of plot holes (eg how do you just get rid of a car without needing to mention to your wife it's gone?); some stereotypical N Irish characters (eg the wife beater and his clamper mate and the troublemakers at the last crime scene); and genuinely peculiar bits (eg the whole gangster plot).

But it was still one of the better things that has been on tv recently (NB not the best, but better). The acting was strong, without a really weak link, which is unusual where there is a large-ish cast. The violence was sometimes gratuitous, but not titillating. It shouldn't be so unusual, but it is good to see a strong female lead.

I enjoyed it very much, and I know it's not called "things we love about the brilliant the Fall", but some of your comments, Aitch, have been a bit out of place on a thread where it's clear that most posters want to discuss the programme from a position of enjoyment rather than criticism.

And well done to those RTE viewers who managed not to spill the beans!

I am still inwardly digesting the denouement....If a second series was only commissioned after BBC2 found the viewing figures to be so impressively high, I'm wondering whether the ending was always destined to be so "up in the air" as it turned out to be?

Well done to the CSIMumsnetter who sussed out the indent of the pregnant lady picture, done by his daughter, on his letter.....

Also, liked the way he did the "we're two of a kind" speech which bears out what we were saying 'upthread'. I was wondering though, when she seemed so tearful with the speech about his little girl finding out the awful truth about her Daddy, whether something similar had happened to her?

Yes, a bit too neat to explain his psycho-pathology on a care-home upbringing....

I too felt quite let down. Not with it being a cliffhanger. Just a 'is that it' ? Feeling.
Thought the last episode was very rushed.
I liked GA's use if the red nailvarnish.
I thought the way wife reacted was so far fetched it was naff.

I did like Ripper street.
Will probably watch 2nd series, only because there's not that much good tv on, to choose an alternative.

We are so used to very neatly wrapped up CSI/Criminal Minds type dramas that it was a bit of a shock for it not to end with an arrest...

The 9.00 - 10.00 pm TV slot is about the only one we watch during the week so they need to put good stuff on then (please). I do think there is an over-reliance on police dramas though - sure it wasn't entirely like that when I was growing up.