"I ask myself: what scenario's more likely? A conspiracy involving a governor, a sheriff and a very lucrative glacier hotel, or some poor bastard off his meds having a psychotic episode in a stranger's house?"
Well, that is the question, isn't it? For Stanley Tucci's DCI Morten, it's 50/50, but for the audience, there are enough potential explanations and red herrings floating around that it's very difficult to reduce it down to anything near as simple as just a 50/50 choice.
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The prime suspect this week appears to be Nicholas Pinnock's Frank Sutter, whose bloodied t-shirt - which was conspicuously glazed over in the first episode - comes to light. Just what was he doing while his son succumbed to frostbite that led him to have human blood on his shirt?
We know what he's being doing since, which is mostly sleeping with Elena - a fact which leads to some delicious tension between Sutter and Anderssen when they're confined to a boat together.
The other prime suspect is Jason, the miner who has the mammoth's tooth and who had an altercation with the murdered professor shortly before his death. With his brother missing, the evidence seems to be mounting… until the brother is found bound and beaten, citing Jason's pal Ronnie Morgan as the aggressor. Fortitude is already proving adept at these sudden u-turns.
So now we know why Morgan was making a break for it last week, but did he really kill the professor?
Morgan's plan is to sell part of the mammoth in order to fund an escape to Norway, still fearing implication in what he suggests is Jason's crime, and despite his actions here – the shot of him sawing the tusk off a mammoth's corpse, as well the terrifying husks of fish hanging outside the cabin, are the sort of horrifyingly bizarre and unsettling visual that Fortitude excels at.
The way Johnny Harris plays him, Morgan really does seem like a gentle enough soul, just a man emotionally rocked by the death of his wife, and it's hard to believe that he'd be capable of a murder as brutal as Stoddart's. But, without his meds, who knows what might bubble to the surface, and our fears turn to his young daughter, kept in hiding out in a freezing cabin in the middle of nowhere.
The series' other child character, poor, frostbitten Liam Sutter, also remains far from safety as his medical condition takes a turn for the worse, leading to a particularly brutal cut from him convulsing in his medical chamber to the image of a child's doll, mired outside in the ice. Again, it's dark little touches like this which help Fortitude stand out.
Michael Gambon's Henry continues to unravel, to the extent that he barely stops shy of pushing for a suicide by cop. Anderssen cares for him, though, and doesn't seem like he would ever harm the aging photographer.
Henry is a drunk and riddled with constant self-pity, but Gambon is such a good actor that even these off-putting traits are rendered captivating. He snarls and snaps, but it's only because he's torn up about the series' opening moments, when he inadvertently shot a man in the head. Anderssen takes the responsibility on himself, but we still don't know exactly how he was involved. For now, he's not saying.
That opening moment weighs heavy over this episode, as Morten's snooping around identifies the name of the poor chap being eaten by the bear as Pettigrew, a man who was apparently conducting a survey regarding an oil deposit beneath the ice – something that others in Fortitude are also taking an interest in. The plot, already gelatinous enough, thickens once more.
Henry, though, denies all knowledge of this when Morten comes knocking, leading to the delightful moment when Morten plays Henry's phone call reporting the murder of Pettigrew, implicating the Governor and the Sheriff, only for Henry to smugly proclaim "That's not my voice". With anyone else, you might believe them, but Gambon's voice is so iconic that it becomes a hilariously meta moment of antagonism for Morten.
Tucci has this wonderfully laid back way of playing Morten, where he's always the smartest one in the room, and thus never seems ill at ease. It's not that he isn't taking things seriously – he's just calm, methodical and supremely confident that he will untangle this web in good time.
Just witness the contrast between Anderssen running frantically to confront Sutter, while Morten calmly shaves to the sounds of classical music. These two men couldn't have more different approaches to this investigation, and it's Morten's that seems the more effective by far.
The episode's climax, with Anderssen approaching Elena's door for the third episode running, sees him finally knock – or, rather, kick it in. Anderssen proceeds to beat Sutter half to death, another frightening reminder that, while he might be the Sheriff of this town, Dan Anderssen is not a particularly level-headed man.
The pressure of having to deal with a genuine crime, as well as the weight of his possible involvement, not to mention his personal life, are taking their toll - and the man has never looked less in charge than in the final shot, as he stumbles dazed out into the snow, a miniscule figure, seemingly judged by the timeless glaciers that surround and dwarf him.
Elsewhere, Darren Boyd's Markus pops up again, and continues to be curiously, if indefinably, creepy. There's definitely something off about him, and despite all of the plot movements so far, it would appear there's more to come from this sprawling, labyrinthine series.
As much as there is going on, the writers are maintaining a good balance between providing answers and posing further questions. Another strong episode.
