Black Spot

The pandemic is definitely giving me more time to watch TV shows I'd been meaning to get to. Black Spot (or Zone Blanche) is a French mystery/paranormal series I found on Netflix. There's two seasons there so far, 8 episodes each. Set in an isolated part of France, where the murder rate is 6 times the national average.

The ranking gendarme is Major Laurene Weiss, who most of the town believes suffered a hunting accident in the woods 20 years ago. What actually happened is she was abducted and shackled to the wall of a canyon for several days, only escaping when she cut off two of her fingers. Two decades later, she still stalks the woods at night, trying to find the place she was held and the person who did it.

The new prosecutor is trying to redeem himself after a bad foul-up in his previous appointment, and has set his sights on the Steiner family, who are the local bigwigs. The son, Bernard, is the mayor, and had a thing with Laurene back in the day. Still does, actually, despite being married. His father is the real mover and shaker, making all kinds of deals, using goons to get people to sell their land, illegally dumping toxic waste in an old quarry, and the prosecutor is trying to nail him for that, among other crimes.

There's an eco-terrorist group the Major's daughter Cora gets mixed up with while trying to locate the mayor's missing daughter. Nature seems to be going nuts, from random swarms of bees, to crows hanging around all the time. Mysterious wolves, and of course, the nutjob in the forest with the stag horns who makes Predator noises. Everyone in town seems to have some sort of sordid history that comes out eventually. Except maybe the Major's friend and right hand man, Teddy Bear. He seemed like a level-headed fellow.

There's usually a murder of the week, so to speak, some of which play off events set up earlier in the season, and sometimes not. The answer is usually not what it first appears, although solving the crime seems to frequently boil down to Laurene getting some sort of hunch that she's ultimately able to prove is correct. Not always, but more than once.

Meanwhile the other wheels move in the background. Whether that's Prosecutor Siriani against the Steiners, the mayor against his wife, the mayor against his father, Cora and the eco-terrorists, Cora against her mom, the Major against the prosecutor, whatever. There aren't really any relationships in the series where you feel as though you can 100% count on a particular character to have another character's back. Maybe Teddy Bear and Laurene, but even that goes through stretches where he outright tells her she's nuts for focusing on this creepy guy in the woods she's hunting. Which might explain why she doesn't share what happened actually to her for quite some time. The mayor and Laurene might be another, but the mayor's always got something else going in the background, and you can't really trust him to actually put what Laurene thinks is most important ahead of what he thinks is most important. Honestly, both their priorities seem a little cock-eyed, so maybe it's a wash.

One of my issues was that, if the nutjob in the woods either is, or believes he is, a spirit of the forest, meant to protect it, why the hell hadn't he killed the Steiner patriarch yet? He targets some farmer that was using some kind of fertilizer on his fields, even after the guy quits using it, but he's not doing anything to the fucker dumping toxic waste? OK, granted, I just really hated that old man, strutting around like he's hot shit because he's got this one rinky-dink ass economically decaying village in his hands, and would have been satisfied with anyone killing him, but friggin' Cernunnos needs to get his priorities straight.