All Things Pankish

Review: CSI Svalbard

Everything I have pointed my eyes towards in the past few weeks has gone through a mental filter named Can I Review This? I rejected my library borrowings – a non-fiction book on Bluestockings and a doorstop horror novel – for being unrelated to the new literary scene. I rejected the books I’d been reading for my book group – Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Sapphire’s Push, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred – on the basis that my perspective was too female-centric. I rejected scads of perfectly serviceable words for not fitting into my arbitrary guidelines on Things Acceptable for the PANK-Reading Public.

I recently read Miracle Jones’s review of Garth Marenghi’s The Ooze at Fiction Circus, and I was thoroughly inspired. The review’s focus on so-called ‘low culture’ showed me that everything I see is ripe for reviewing, as long as I can use the same critical faculties I would use to review ‘high art’. And this brings me to my review of the first episode of CSI: Svalbard.

Even though I have never visited them, I can understand that Las Vegas, New York and Miami are rife with many different varieties of crime – meaning an endless pool of episode plotlines. I have never visited Svalbard either, but I would have expected that its total population of 2,000 would provide a limited source of inspiration – particularly as most of Svalbard’s inhabitants are there working temporarily at weather and research stations, and are thus unlikely to commit any crimes while they are there. My misconceptions only served to heighten my admiration for CSI: Svalbard’s writers, as the first episode is a work of genius.

We are first introduced to the head of the CSI department, Dr Harry Steele, by a full-screen shot of a polished brass nameplate set askew on a desk. The camera pans across the lid of a brandy decanter and a still-smoking cigar ringed in red lipstick. Suddenly it zooms out and the screen is filled with the red-haired, buxom, yet troubled Harriet Steele – played to perfection by Gillian Anderson – reclining in her chair and gazing at a full glass of brandy. We observe Dr Steele conducting a battle of wills with the brandy, before dashing the glass down on the desk with a sigh. She puts the lid back on the decanter, sweeps back her fiery locks, and opens the case file in front of her. Within moments, we are drawn into the most serious – and apparently unsolvable – crime that Svalbard has ever seen. Karl Jonsson, head of a mysterious research station, has been found dead with a massive chest wound but no sign of a weapon. It’s up to Dr Steele and her team to solve this horrible crime, without stepping on the toes of the secret activities at the research station.

It’s on with the lab coats, and before long Dr Steele has tweezered a blonde hair from Karl Jonsson’s shoulder. A few minutes later the DNA from the hair is matched to a local man. One of Dr Steele’s CSIs, Elizabeth Tucker, brings the suspect in for questioning. Tucker is played by the ever-adorable Carey Mulligan, who uses all her charms on the shaven-headed and slow-speaking suspect. Just when Tucker’s BBC accent and blonde crop have caused the suspect to drop his guard, she slams her palms on the table and flings a series of crime-scene photographs in his face. He soon breaks down and confesses, while also dropping some tantalising clues about nefarious goings-on at the research station. The young and impressionable Bon Westler, played by Lizzie McGuire’s Adam Lamberg, is revealed as the final member of the CSI: Svalbard team. He has some startling news: this man cannot have committed the crime, because his missing thumbs would have prevented him from wielding the unknown mudrer weapon. Not to worry; before long the CSI team have solved the crime: Jonsson was killed with a six-foot icicle by a fellow member of his research team who was made wildly jealous by Jonsson’s wife’s fish catch constantly being larger than the culprit’s own wife’s fish catch. His murder weapon may have melted, but there is no escape from the CSIs.

Aside from arresting the culprit, the CSI: Svalbard team also manage to get into some hair-raising scrapes at the research station, uncover a few mysteries certain to return in later episodes, indulge in several x-ray zooms of the insides of icebergs, and finally share a heart-to-heart over a few beers. It is in this final scene that we learn of the character’s back-stories: Harry Steele is a recovering alcoholic battling with her ubiquitous brandy decanter, Elizabeth Tucker is a disinherited heiress who cheated her way through school, and Bon Westler tried to kill his brother with a hockey puck.

One of my favourite things about CSI: Svalbard is Dr Harry Steele. It’s refreshing to see a woman head up a CSI team, because despite the presence of strong female characters in the other CSI programmes it is apparently still necessary to have a man running things. If anyone can show the TV-viewing public that a woman is just as capable of handling plot twists and a microscope, it’s Gillian Anderson.

The location is so magnificent that it threatens to overshadow the cast. White-tipped mountains dusted with clouds, roaming reindeer and falling snow add up to incredible between-scene background shots. Even the CSI research lab is picturesque: a neat red-roofed hut on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. As well as providing obstacles, Svalbard’s landscape may also provide fascinating stories: I look forward to seeing how the writers will handle the constant light of the April-August midnight sun, or the constant darkness of the October-February polar night. If murders continue at such a rate, Svalbard’s 2,000-strong population will swiftly dwindle, making it much easier for the CSI team to catch the bad guys.

CSI: Svalbard is off to an explosive start, and I for one am eager to see what else this new series will bring.