Fortitude's second episode (or is it the third?) is not as propulsive as the opening instalment, but it's no less enthralling.
"He knew this place was fierce. Merciless. It's neither good nor bad. It's vivid. And unsullied. And wild." So says Sienna Guillory's Natalie of the town she lives in, and it's as good a description as any based on these first few episodes.
After the thrilling and gruesome events of last week, this week sees our characters taking stock and catching up on the news that has rocked this small, isolated town. News travels fast, and everyone responds to it differently.
After arriving late in the first episode, Stanley Tucci's DCI Morten continues to make an impression, as he ghosts through the town, manipulating people with expert precision. He's a seriously smooth customer, but we don't actually know a great deal about him yet.
The fact that he arrived in Fortitude with apparent foreknowledge of the crime - or at least *a* crime - is intriguing, but for however long Fortitude chooses to keep that card close to its chest, it's simply a pleasure watching Tucci slyly and confidently go about his business.
Elsewhere, Governor Hildur Odegard gets on the scent of the mammoth that was uncovered, and shows that she can be as cold as the town she presides over, when she deletes Professor Stoddart's voicemail from his widow's phone. If Hildur is willing to callously delete the last remnant of this woman's murdered husband, what else might she be capable of?
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Nicholas Pinnock's Frank Sutter also demonstrates his flawed character, as he's racked with guilt over his affair and his son's hospitalisation, but is powerless to change his ways, falling instantly back into the embrace of his Spanish seductress. Not many in Fortitude are actually showing a great deal of that character trait thus far.
In the series' most tangential and perhaps least compelling element so far, Johnny Harris's Ronnie Morgan, fearing implication in his friend Jason's potential crimes, absconds with his daughter on a boat out into the bay.
It's nothing against Harris, it's just that we don't really know his character yet: we've not spent much time with him and his daughter. But it never feels like the show doesn't know what it's doing, more that it just hasn't played that particular hand yet. With the show so impeccably crafted, it's earned a little trust in telling its story in its own time.
While the story unfolds, Fortitude populates itself with plenty of fascinating asides. Take, for example, the fact that nobody is allowed to die in the town, due to the constant permafrost preserving all the corpses, as well as the various diseases that they might have died with. There are bodies still buried in Fortitude that have the plague!
The implication is that, along with physical bodies, secrets, too, are preserved in Fortitude, only lying dormant and waiting to be uncovered. The show continues to tease the prospect of a more literal outbreak story developing, but titbits like this are probably more just for local colour rather than actual foreshadowing.
In other corners of the show, Michael Gambon continues to provide great entertainment, switching from irascible old codger to a genial, grandfatherly figure, depending on who he's in a room with, and Sienna Guillory finds herself pulled this way and that in regards to the mysterious mammoth remains.
It's also of note that the device used to preview the next episode is particularly effective. The quick inserts of footage embedded in the closing credits are a great way of building tension for what's to come next without giving anything away. It's less obvious and clunky than having a traditional 'next time on…' supercut at the end, and this manner of feeding the previews in somehow creates a more seamless link between the instalments.
Just over two hours in, and as engrossing as this series is, it feels like we've barely even scratched the surface of this place. And there's doubtless more than just the plague buried under the frosty façade of Fortitude.
