A newspaper journalist revealing fraud in a large multinational company, finds his family involved, ruining his career, family relations, and entangles him in a following mystery. The first season of this series is good although by no mean easy to digest at one go nor is it one of my favourite Nordic series. Still, I would give it a 7 out of 10. The second season, however, tries too hard to replicate the success of the first season. And fails. Terribly.<br/><br/>Things change. Peter turns out to be a womaniser perhaps due to circumstances in his life. Inger Marie is divorced yet again and is in an affair with her colleague. In the first season, I feel that the writer(s) successfully combined mystery and conspiracy into the story line. The second season, on the other hand, consists of pure conspiracy that just doesn't build up my curiosity simply due to the lack of 'mysteriousness' - if that's a word. It feels like they are trying to compress so much into so little that the outcome is all over the place.<br/><br/>A colleague (and an office bully) is killed in his car while leaving the office. The Prime Minister badmouths his minister in a planned video leaking to push the minister further. Then the PM is murdered and his daughter poisoned while meeting Peter. Then waffles happened.<br/><br/>I'm not saying the plot of the second season is ludicrous but it is getting there. They might as well add a natural disaster scene to the story line and it still won't help save the show. The acting is also noticeably more wooden than the first with no strong characters in the lineup.<br/><br/>I have to admit though that this series is very brave in killing its protagonists - Peter's ex-girlfriend in the first season and Mathiesen in the second.<br/><br/>Overall: sorry, it's a flop The decade-long international craze for Scandinavian crime thrillers seems to reach a tipping point with this overstuffed and flatulent boondoggle of a mini-series from Norway. "Mammon" would like to be "The Bridge," leading us down one false path after another to spectacular cliff-hangers and shocking revelations, but the writers are too lazy to come up with plausible reasons for all this frantic action. I hate it when I invest 6 hours in a mini-series, expecting that "all will be revealed" at the end, and the end comes, and I can only shake my head at all the nonsense I've watched and all the gaping holes in the plot. It's almost as if no single person actually read the whole script!<br/><br/>Scene for scene, the show is just engaging enough to watch, but even at this level some of the red herrings are too obvious and the repeated attempts at suspense too repetitious. (OMG! Is that car following us? No, just a false alarm. No, wait, it WAS following us!)<br/><br/>Spoiler: One example of the ludicrous lengths to which the writers will go simply to obtain that spooky "The Bridge" feeling: the package received by the dead man's brother and his wife seven years after his death, containing directions to a time and place and a wet suit, because the dead man knew that at exactly that place, and exactly that day, another death would occur in exactly that way. Amazing! But in the end, this elaborate plot twist turns out to make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER (like much of the plot); it's assumed that we viewers are so stupid we will have forgotten this pivotal scene by the end and won't care that there is no explanation.<br/><br/>They tried to make "The Bridge," but this bridge went nowhere.
Eliber replied
295 weeks ago