Well, that was quite the opening sequence, wasn't it?
Only five episodes into the series, and Fortitude opens with an extended flashback to the night of the murder, showing us a hell of a lot of detail about what went down in Charlie Stoddart's living room, right up to the point of – possibly – revealing the murderer! In episode five!
Liam, it transpires, awoke, presumably delirious, and wondered out into the night, giving us the haunting image of a spaced-out child, half-dressed and unknowable, walking down the icy streets of Fortitude, working his way eventually to the door of Charlie Stoddart. Stoddart takes him in, and, inexplicably, horrifyingly, Liam cracks him over the head with a chopping board.
And then… well. And then we skip forward to Liam back at home, covered in blood, at which point his dad Frank comes in and the show corroborates his alibi story from the end of last week's episode.
It's a wonderful way to start the episode, and one that again demonstrates the confident storytelling that Simon Donaldson is enacting in his series. This is easily a sequence that the show could have withheld until the season finale.
If you're frustrated that they didn't show us everything – be glad they showed us anything! Many shows wouldn't have. Fortitude ebbs and flows beautifully, knowing exactly when to tease out a mystery, and when to shine a light on one. And it was, of course, great to see Christopher Eccleston again in the flashback, albeit briefly.
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It's no coincidence that the flashback cuts before explicitly depicting Stoddart's death. He's very much alive when we last see him – dazed, but alive – and while the discovery of Liam's fingernail in his chest-wounds, as well as his drugged-up, pain-addled confession that he "put his hands inside the man" would seem to leave no doubt about who killed Stoddart, we didn't see it.
And the golden rule of television is: if you don't see it, you can't be sure. For all we know, Liam could have put his hands in to try and save him after somebody else had attacked, and for all Sky Atlantic's #KillerRevealed publicity before the episode aired, we're not convinced that there won't be further twists to this tale.
After all, let's not forget that Sheriff Anderson was somehow on the scene before Luke Treadaway's Vincent ever arrived and discovered the body...
Whether it was Liam, suffering, as Morten describes, a "profound psychosis", or something else, the town is happy to believe that the Sutter child is the killer, and so Morten moves his attention on to the Pettigrew case, which puts him on the trail of Yuri, the mysterious Russian who's been skulking around town. It also leads him to an uncomfortable dinner with Anderson, where they share war-stories with one another.
Morten, it transpires, had the uncomfortable task of dealing with the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing, while Anderson appropriates Henry's version of the day Pettigrew died, citing a mercy-killing as the polar bear went to work.
There's great work from Richard Dormer here; we already know what happened that day, yet Anderson is entirely convincing in the lie, but Morten isn't so easily fooled. The antagonism between these two is going to come to a head, soon, and it's not going to be pretty.
Elsewhere, poor Jules Sutter continues to go through hell, as the town's Powers That Be decide to awaken her ailing son, causing him significant agony, with barely a pause for thought regarding how it might affect Liam or Jules. Jessica Raine has been fantastic at depicting Jules as the (seemingly) innocent woman caught up in all the ill deeds of others, eventually driven to a bottle.
Another innocent, Carrie Morgan, is also beginning to fray, as she decides she's had enough of being dragged to-and-fro across the ice by her renegade dad. Without his medication, Morgan appears to be slipping, launching a foul-mouthed tirade at his terrified daughter that raises questions about just how far he might worsen if he doesn't get back to civilisation soon.
Creepy Markus, meanwhile, remains exceptionally creepy. This week he's trying to force-feed an ailing Shirley chicken soup to help her recover from illness. The cameras always make sure to find an angle that amplifies Shirley's mass, rendering Darren Boyd's delivery of a line like "Well we'll have to do something, before you waste away to nothing at all" almost unbearable.
And, in perhaps Fortitude's first lapse into hokum, Henry visits the town's local taxidermist/shaman (obviously) and asks him to create a supernatural Nordic golem to protect little Liam Sutter.
Whilst it's hardly wizards and witches, the notion of shamanistic rituals that require the blood of murderers doesn't feel like it quite belongs in a show like this. More than that, it's hard to believe that Gambon's Henry would buy into it all. We'll see where it goes, but for now this feels like a rare misstep.
If a shaman seems a step too far, Fortitude still seems determined to convince us that something otherworldly terrible is going to happen. The eerie sound-design still wants us to believe that this is a sci-fi/horror that we're watching. The show is full of dark, disturbing imagery and the sense of isolation and desolation lend it a real X-Files vibe, all designed to keep the audience in a constant state of unease.
Take, for example, the shot of the gunk leaking off the rotting mammoth and trickling down a local drain. That slime sure looked sinister, but it's probably just misdirection, right? Or - is it?
Liam's obviously not well, Shirley is bed-ridden, and Morten throws up in this episode. All have reasonable explanations – Liam's ordeal, Shirley's force-feeding, Morten drinking and sampling dodgy local cuisine – but Fortitude resolutely refuses to let die the notion that some awful sickness could be about to break to the surface here.
We know that the plague survives just under the surface of Fortitude the town, and there's a constant suggestion that a horror story lurks just under the surface of Fortitude the series.
