Not Going Beck

There's a pun in the title there, but only obvious to Britain dwelling English speakers ....

It seems like only yesterday, although it is probably more like a month, that I was rejoicing in the return to our  screens of Beck, the Swedish crime drama, and appointment to view TV as far as I was concerned.

Sadly after the episode which aired last evening, I won't be watching anymore.

The point about Beck was that I didn't watch it for the lugubrious protagonist, or his misery-hunched, whey-faced daughter, or  his mad drunken neighbour who seems to  wear a permanent neck brace from choice, or for idiot boy Oskar the  no-longer rookie cop who still persists in making rookie cop mistakes.

 

No I watched Beck for bad boy Mikael Persbrand playing Beck's volatile sidekick Gunvald Larsson. Gunnvald was the sort of cop that we should all  deplore in real life; an end justifies the means cop, a let's clear the streets of this trash even if we have to break rules to do it cop, a cop who had no patience with a system that seemed sometimes to protect the guilty more assiduously than it avenged the innocent. And he wasn't above doing things that as a policeman he shouldn't do, in  order to weigh the scales a little more in favour of those who were wronged, rather than those who wronged them.

He was I suppose a character who was always going to come to bad end, but I wasn't prepared for the bad end not to coincide with the end of the series as a whole. Beck without Gunnvald is going to be like crisps without salt - totally non-consumable. Especially as, as far as I can tell,  Persbrand was replaced by a man with a face like a troll and an extremely unkempt red beard.



It's not the best picture of Persbrand I've ever seen. But you have to hope it's the worst picture ever taken of his replacement. Or is that too harsh?