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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A quick precis: it's a French crime show set in the town of Villefranche, which is snug up against what is basically a Magic Murder Forest where strange and eldritch things happen - so basically, a crime show with magic elements.
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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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Laurene believes her own ordeal is tied to Marion's disappearance, and so has her own side-investigation going to piece things together - not exactly hidden from her colleagues, but private, as it touches on the uncanny/magic aspects of what goes on in the forest.
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Complicating this is Laurene's relationship with the mayor, Bertrand: they were dating as teens at the time of her disappearance, and have maintained a push-pull attraction ever since, made more fraught by Bertrand's locally powerful family and, of course, his marriage.
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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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Replying to @fozmeadows
Is the magic comprehensible? Like, does it have motives and limits that are well defined, because I'm kind of getting tired of this science fiction pretending to be fantasy thing we see in many shows.
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The magic is sparing, but comprehensible; if you're familiar with myths about old European forests and paganism, it's basically borrowed from that.
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