BBC Two
Serial-killer shows aren’t hard to find these days: Dexter, Hannibal, The Killing, The Following, The Bridge, not to mention all the CSIs, and NCISes. But in a sea of television that has made the ritualistic murder of women an industry unto itself, The Fall manages to be a feminist show about a sexually-motivated serial killer that not only critiques the real-life phenomenon of violence against women, but the pernicious way that so many shows turn it into entertainment.
It also has Gillian Anderson, and fans who loved her as Special Agent Scully on The X-Files would be well advised to watch her on the BBC show, where she stars as the cool, effortlessly excellent Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson. A British police officer brought in to oversee a murder investigation in Northern Ireland, Gibson ends up chasing a serial killer who targets professional women. But far from just going through the motions of a police procedural show, her on-screen sleuthing uncovers how cop shows have been treating women for years.
“Violence against women, often graphic, has been part of TV drama for a very long time,” says The Fall’s creator Allan Cubitt. Too often, Cubitt says, television shows that focus on female victims tend to eroticize and glamorize their murders—just like sexually motivated killers themselves. “One of the ways the killer is able to perpetrate such crimes is by objectifying and dehumanizing their prey. Torturers do the same thing. I think it’s important that drama doesn’t do that. … My concern has always been that because we don’t know who they are, we feel nothing for these victims—not even their fundamental humanity.”
But if The Fall, which will debut its second season on Netflix on Jan. 16, strives to grant more humanity to its female victims, it also offers it to a far more controversial figure: their killer.
The Fall is not a mystery; we know from the very first moments exactly who the murderer is, a family man and grief counselor named Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan). Spector is a disturbing figure, not simply because he seems to be a loving father and husband, but because he actually might be. We see him cuddle his daughter at the park—while simultaneously stalking a future victim sitting on a nearby bench. Not only does he feel and understand emotions, but his entire job is devoted to discussing them. A grief counselor, we see him offer legitimately helpful advice to a bereaved mother who fits the profile of his victims—while doodling her half-naked in his notepad.
Spector terrifies not because he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but because he is a different sort of animal entirely, a chimera that is just as much sheep as it is wolf. He is no Dexter Morgan, mechanically acting out the part of a human being and always seeming slightly “off.” Spector is very much on: He jokes with his in-laws, socializes with friends, strikes all the right notes. He seems to feel very deeply at times, to understand the emotions of his patients, and genuinely love his family. He even expresses regret when he learns one of his female victims had been pregnant. “Babies are innocent,” he writes in an anonymous apology to the woman’s father. “I’ve always felt very protective of children.”
When he holds his wife, on the edge of tears, and says, “only you can save me from myself,” we believe him—or at least, we believe that he thinks it’s true.
Jamie Dornan stars as Paul Spector in The Fall. BBC Two
We see our own discomfort with this sort of ambiguity in the way we talk about murderers and rapists: as monsters, as demons, as an unadulterated form of evil that permits no good. We separate them from their humanity, we divide them into a different class of being, because we are not comfortable feeling like we walk among them unawares—though of course, we do.
When an officer on the case complains to Gibson that people keep calling in and reporting their husbands, boyfriends, and sons as the serial killer, she replies coolly, “It is a husband, boyfriend, brother, son we’re looking for.”
Our insistence that a murderer or rapist looks or behaves a “certain way” is not only misguided but dangerous, allowing predators to escape notice and continue to prey on their victims. Spector is a handsome, charming father of two, not to mention a counselor whose very position engenders deep emotional trust, a man who helps comfort bereaved parents and even rescues one of his clients from domestic abuse. And it’s true: He is all of those things. But he’s also something else.
Consider the stunned reaction we so often see from the friends and acquaintances of people accused of terrible crimes: “But he seemed so normal.” As though the appearance of normalcy were a protective talisman, like garlic or a cross. On a fundamental level, we want to believe that people are knowable, that our friends and neighbors and even lovers are who we think they are, that they could never secretly be capable of terrible things. We tell ourselves this because we have to, because how else can you live?
One of the saddest characters on the show is Spector’s wife Sally Ann (Bronagh Waugh), a neonatal nurse with no clue what her husband is really doing when he goes out at night, pretending to work at a help line. Spector’s crimes feel like a sword hanging not only over his head but hers, waiting to drop and destroy her and her children utterly. Indeed, they seem to leave at least a subconscious mark on his daughter Olivia (Sarah Beattie), who starts having night terrors and drawing pictures of murdered princesses in school.
Spector’s relationship with Olivia also points at the larger issue of misogyny, and how it often collides in contradictory ways with fatherhood: How do men who do terrible things to women—or who encourage a culture that is abusive and dangerous to women—reconcile their behavior with the love that they have for their daughters?
In the final scene of the first season, Gibson confronts the still-anonymous Spector by phone with this very question: “Does [your daughter] love her daddy? Does she look up to him? … What’s going to happen when she finds out who you really are, what you really do? It will destroy her. It will kill her.”
As much as we enjoy horror movies and outlandish, sensational tales of murder—perhaps because they are so safely outlandish—the truly scary stories are often the ones that remind us that bad people often don’t wear black hats, that people are fundamentally unknowable, and that the face of evil is often terribly banal.
It’s the same feeling evoked by “Westfall” by Okkervil River, one of the most haunting songs about murder ever written. Based loosely on the 1991 murders of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop in Austin, it is sung from the point of view of the killer; after his arrest, he reflects on the people and cameras staring at him, searching for outward signs of malevolence, trying desperately to believe they would have known—that they would have been able to protect themselves.
“They’re looking for evil, thinking they can trace it,” he sings. “But evil don’t look like anything.”
The Fall‘s second season comes to Netflix on Jan. 16. The first season is already streaming—catch up here.
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