Unlike in these weekly reviews, there’s not a word wasted in The Returned. Not one.
No character jokes, or banters, and – because the electricity’s still off – no one discusses the football results, or wonders what’s happening in the country’s top soap opera, Plus belle la vie. They’re cut off from everything, yet no one seems concerned about the rest of France, with its electricity, coffee, and – if GCSE French taught me anything – plentiful discothèques. It’s like they’re living in a snow-globe.
With no outside distractions, everything that everyone says feels important in understanding this snow-globe town. And it is important. All of it. There’s not an ounce of fat on Fabrice Gobert’s scripts.
Every sentence is structured without floridity, tautology, redundancy. There’s not one stray thought or wasted word. It really makes you pay attention (the fact that you have to read everything probably helps that too).
So this week, pay attention to the plight of poor Virgil. Last week Victor was the child to feel sorry for. Now it’s Virgil. Until now he may have looked like the kind of youth you’d see smoking insouciantly at the back of the discothèque in La Rochelle (thanks, GCSEs), but he’s got a past that really makes you feel for him, even though you’ve known him all of five minutes.
Locked in a cellar, pulped into a bloody, throbbing mass of flesh, and killed by Milan, only to then be turned away by his pensioner parents upon ‘returning’: Virgil’s a character of tremendous sympathy. So much so that I found myself ‘shipping him and Camille, just for a ray of hope in his pitch-dark story. They’d make a cute couple, holding hands and exchanging psychic thoughts about being kept in a cellar and whatnot.
Being kept in a cellar is something of a theme this week. Virgil was in a cellar, Milan’s in a cellar, Toni’s in a cellar, and with all three it’s Serge who’s always at the door, deciding who goes free and who gets shot in the face or clubbed with a fire extinguisher. I feel like I’m in a cellar. A cellar of emotion.
As we dive into Virgil’s past, both Julie and Berg independently sift through the equally sad story of Victor and his family. Julie learns that everybody in the town thought Victor/Louis was the Devil and responsible for the dam bursting, which is why Milan had him killed. And just while you’re thinking that’s a load of superstitious cobblers, Berg discovers a hidden stash of Victor’s future-predicting drawings. Is he the Devil? Or just a child psychic with a pack of Crayola?
Simon makes a late play for sob-story of the week, watching his returned parents take care of his kidnapped son, thinking it’s baby Simon. Sorry, unless your story involves someone being manacled underground it’s just not cutting it.
That said, the vision he has of his father coolly raising a gun to his wife’s head and pulling the trigger is an arresting sight. They apparently joined ‘the circle’. The circle of life and death and rebirth? The circle that everyone forms at the Helping Hand to pray? The Cirque du Soleil?
More likely it’s to do with Victor’s picture of people in a circle shooting each other, briefly glimpsed in his gallery of crayon terror. Whatever it is, it’s always entertaining when The Returned goes a bit Twin Peaks and nods to one of its televisual inspirations.
Out of his cellar, Milan, who is the unpleasantly pungent glue holding terrible events from 35 years ago together, wakes only to be dropped in the lake by Lucy.
That’s the last we’ve seen of him? No chance. Which is great because as much as you hate Milan, it’s been fascinating to watch and learn how his brand of pseudo-religious insanity works, even if it is overly-convenient to explaining a lot of the show’s backstory (they’ll tell us he built the Lake Pub next). For all his zealotry of cleaning sins, Milan’s the real Devil. Which might just make Victor some kind of saviour…
I could speculate more, but at this stage that’d be a waste of words, and very un-The Returned.
Aired at 9pm on Friday 6 November 2015 on More4.
> Buy Season 1 on DVD on Amazon.
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