Have you noticed how animals are always bad omens in The Returned?
Last season there was the butterfly which appeared as Mr Costa killed himself; then Mme Payet being feasted on my her cats like she was an ‘All You Can Nom’ Whiskas buffet; then bits of a stag wedged in a bin in a macabre version of that Peep Show episode on the barge; animal corpses floating in the reservoir; and a veritable museum of taxidermy in Serge & Toni’s nightmare cottage.
Wherever there are animals in The Returned, there is death.
That hasn’t changed this season. The dead floaty-goat still bobs by the producer credits in the titles. The noble stag in Episode 1 was dead and eaten by human teeth by Episode 2. And now Mme Costa’s dog Titus is the next animal to be a harbinger of mortality. 35 years ago Mme Costa fell through the frozen lake (in a shot so bloody beautiful you could frame it) and drowned while fetching him.
If only she’s paid attention to Victor’s terrifying drawings. But no one ever pays serious attention to anything rendered in crayon. Crayon is the Comic Sans of artistic media.
Fortunately Berg and Jerome are paying attention to them, with a long pan across Victor’s artwork that reminded me so much of the Gallery section from Tony Hart’s ‘Vision On’, that I actually rewatched it back with ‘Left Bank Two’ playing over it. Try it yourself, it’s terrific.
Victor can predict the future in his nightmares, which we’ve long suspected/known but now it’s out there as truth, from the mouths of babes n’ all that. His prophetic nightmare about something happening to Julie is an eerie bit of sound and vision – proof that The Returned can still surprise and unnerve in simple, stylish ways.
Off he trots, Mme Costa following the creepy but oddly benevolent boy like he’s her dog, as he goes to save Julie from falling off something in the future. The only falling she’s in danger of this week is falling asleep, as she hangs around the hospital with Victor’s comatose father, which, as I relate it to you now sounds utterly inconsequential, but in fact is filled with meaning and emotion.
The same can be said for the moment when Audrey is reunited with her mum and there’s a rapid gear change between shock, disbelief, mistrust, trust, love, betrayal, and shock again, all in about 30 seconds. Mummy Sabatini has brought Pierre and his boyband of stormtrooper scouts with her.
Now’s a good time to point out an emerging flaw in The Returned: as other characters have grown, Pierre’s become a weak villain. Milan, now there’s a good villain. Look at him, waking at the bottom of a lake like a badass. But Pierre has slipped.
In Season 1 he was an insidious and – more importantly – believable domestic menace, separating Jerome from Claire and the rest of his family. Now, he’s become a 2D frown with a shotgun and a YMCA’s worth of disaffected youths, busy locking up undead stragglers in between drawing up the Helping Hands’ weekly meal plan.
And what of the Returned? Are they villains, standing around like a group of catatonic EMOs, slowly swelling their ranks by osmosis, and beating or following anyone who tries to escape them?
Or are they more benevolent, and protecting the living from whatever/whoever is down that hole? Lucy does tell human ballpoint Alcide that it was her gang of Returned who tied the police to the trees to save them from whatever was eating them.
But then she also says she needs Adele’s baby to ‘find the path’, and no plan in history that required a baby has been for the purposes of good (see, Ghostbusters 2, Rosemary’s Baby, and Three Men and a Baby). At least we know Adele’s baby isn’t evil, else it would have burst into flame during its baptism.
Whatever the Returned are up to, good or bad, it’s hopefully going to inform the reason why they’re all back from the dead in the first place. That’s a question the show’s been dodging with drama since it began. It’s been doing so well that for the past few weeks that you’d be forgiven for forgetting it.
Now, with three episodes left, it might be time for a few answers. Do we have a dog/goat/cat in hell’s chance of getting them?
Aired at 10pm on Friday 13 November 2015 on More4.
> Buy Season 1 on DVD on Amazon.
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