In s1, the main ongoing plots involve protagonist Major Laurene Weiss, who was held captive in the forest for three days as a teen and emerged with two missing fingers and memory gaps about what happened, and the disappearance of the mayor's daughter Marion 6 months ago.
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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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