OK, so now that I'm feeling coherent after finishing S1 of Black Spot (aka Zone Blanche) on Netflix last night, I need to talk about how fucking amazing this show is ahead of the S2 drop on June 14th.
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In the first episode, our introduction to Laurene and Villefranche comes from the arrival of a new district attorney, Franck Siraini, out of favour with his superiors and intrigued by the fact that Villefranche has six times the national average of murder cases.
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And then there's Laurene's teenage daughter, Cora - a rebel against the mayor's family and friend of Marion who, as the season progresses, gets more and more involved with protest groups as part of trying to find out what happened to her friend.
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With all this going on, each episode otherwise focuses on a single case, most of which are interwoven with the forest's magic in some way - and it's here that Black Spot really sets itself apart from other crime shows and becomes extraordinary, for two reasons:
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Firstly, because the crimes themselves don't tend to be outlandish or shocking, nor are they the result of convoluted motives. The forest and its magic provides both an interwoven sense of mystery and a lens through which to view the mundane world of its human neighbours.
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And secondly, because at no point in the show are women needlessly brutalised or tortured or shown naked on an autopsy table, even when they're victims of murder. Which shouldn't be such a goddamn high bar to leap over! AND YET.
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Genuinely, when I finished S1, I had to sit down with my thoughts for a solid hour before I really processed the fact that at no point in the show are we shown gratuitous shots of dead female bodies, or crying women pleading for their lives, or cut scenes to female brutalisation.
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There's a single episode that involves sexual abuse, and WE NEVER SEE IT HAPPEN. As in Mad Max: Fury Road, the only proof we're given is the spoken testimony of the victim, without being forced to watch it in order to make it "real".
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This is doubly salient because of Laurene's captivity as a teen and Marion's disappearance: more than once, the story goes out of its way to reassure us that neither woman is sexually assaulted, and goddamn, that means SO MUCH TO ME.
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I love crime shows and especially when they have eerie magic vibes, but it's so fucking RARE for something like this to exist without being grounded in misogyny and rape that it makes me aware all over again of how much narrative shit I put up with elsewhere.
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And then there's Laurene's fellow gendarme, affectionately known as Teddy Bear to his colleagues: an openly gay man who keeps a guinea pig in his office, looks like a soft-spoken lumberjack, wears the same red toque everywhere and has an Embarrassing Thirst Moment for Siriani.
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I LOVE THIS SHOW WITH MY WHOLE HEART, it's just... such honest characterisation? All the characters feel real and distinct, even when they only crop up occasionally, like Leila the doctor and Sabine the bartender. Laurene is an amazing lead, too.
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And then there's Villefranche itself, which feels very much like a genius loci rooted in old European/Scandinavian mythology. A horned figure glimpsed in the woods; a pair of ever-watching crows; a sentinel wolf vanishing into the trees; a nest of snakes coiled around evidence.
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The music, the cinematography, the pacing and scripting - every aspect of Black Spot is masterful. And when you get to the final reveal of the last two episodes... I'm a trope-literate person who's hard to surprise, and I NEVER GUESSED WHAT WAS COMING EVEN THOUGH IT MADE SENSE.
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This is a difficult thing to articulate, but lots of crime shows fall into a trap of either having very elaborate clue-paths and motives for the detectives to solve, or completely abandon all logic to give you a Shock Reveal, because they want too badly to always surprise you.
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Black Spot, though, doesn't have this problem. Because the ongoing plot threads are so rich, the mysteries so compelling, the actual crimes themselves are plausible, with regular motivations - it's how they fit into the wider picture of Villefranche and its magic that intrigues.
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More than once, individual episodes borrow from familiar horror tropes - a cave search evokes The Descent in one; found footage suggests The Blair Witch Project in another - but this never feels stale even so; more like a self-aware homage.
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The only show I've ever seen like it - and which I also highly recommend - is a Swedish show called Jordskott, whose second season I haven't yet seen, but which is also a magic murder forest crime show that touches on industrial politics, child loss and old pagan magic.
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S1 of Black Spot is only eight episodes long, so you can burn through it in a day if you have the time and inclination, but I recommend drawing it out a little longer: it's one of those rare shows that's so good, you want to savour it.
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In conclusion, PLEASE WATCH BLACK SPOT I NEED MORE PEOPLE TO YELL ABOUT HOW AWESOME IT IS WITH ME.
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(Also, final sidebar: as someone who has written a book whose female protagonist loses two fingers early on, I was weirdly thrilled that Laurene also has this in her story.)
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End of conversation
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