‘Black Spot’ on Netflix Episode 5 Recap: The Gang’s All Here

As we approach the home stretch of Black Spot Season 1, this much is clear: Everyone else seems to settle into the town of Villefranche for life, but dead things have a hard time staying put.

Those two very, very different images of post-mortem movement bookend “The End of the Road,” yet another drearily predictable mystery wrapped in sumptuous cinematography and magnetic acting in Black Spot‘s ever-growing tally. It’s like taking Woodward & Bernstein and using it to wrap the catch of the day.

The real asskicker is that if creator Mathieu Missoffe had gotten half as creative with the script as the filmmakers and cast have gotten with what they’re doing, so many of the show’s problems would be nothing but dodged bullets.

Like, okay, so in this episode Hermann, one of Major Weiss’s Cuddly Cops, brings the big fish he caught before work to the El Dorado Inn so Sabine can serve it as a special that day. But he interrupts a gang of bank robbers or a stickup crew or something to that effect—what they’re doing there isn’t exactly clear for a while—and a shootout ensues when the catfish twitches and surprises everyone, causing itchy trigger fingers to convulse.

Fortunately for the Villefranche P.D. but unfortunately for viewers who like violence to have consequences, Hermann lives and only a random goon goes down. As the cops try to figure out how a multi-man crew of heavily armed pros winds up in their one-horse town, Weiss interviews Anna, who was the woman behind the bar when the gunfight went down. Thoroughly freaked out, Anna bemoans how she didn’t even have a chance to call her son, and says that the gunmen showed their weapons but didn’t make any demands before Hermann walked obliviously into the scenario.

Congratulations to everyone who guessed “Anna is involved with the stickup crew and her son is a key element of the crime.” You’ve won Black Spot Bingo, where there’s only one space on the bingo card, and the space is always free.

Seriously, you can go back through all five episodes so far now and see the answers coming from a mile away. Anna mentions her son? Her son was fathered by the leader of the stickup crew, who’s come looking for them after breaking out of prison. A bunch of teens mention a missing girlfriend? The missing girlfriend is the reason one of them gets tied to a tree with his throat slashed. A suspect’s brother confirms the suspect is crazy, and the suspect got in an altercation with the legbreaker for the local rich dude? The brother did it, in order to collect a large sum of money from the local rich dude.

In retrospect even the crimes I didn’t personally solve within minutes fit the pattern. The father of a kidnapping victim mentions how he could never pay a ransom on a social worker’s salary? His job as a social worker is the kidnapper’s motive. A murder victim’s brother is a well-known junkie? His junkiedom is the cause of all the trouble in a roundabout way. Now that I see how it works—a character drops a seemingly innocuous detail, and that detail has been included for the sole purpose of setting up the crime around which the episod resolves—it’s going to be impossible not to see going forward.

Which is a goddamn shame, because have you seen how this show looks?

Helmed this time by Julien Despaux, Black Spot is so, so lovely to look at, a fact that as always extends from exterior shots to closeups of the cast. This episode shakes up the usual template of darks and greens to take us into the streets of the town’s main district—streetlight-orange and midnight-blue after dark, bright as polished gunmetal by day.

And as Anna, actor Cyrielle Debreuil holds the light with her face like her face itself is its source. Not everyone has this ability, and not every filmmaker has the ability to showcase it this beautifully and emotionally.

Even some elements of the episode I found exasperating at first turned around by the end. Hermann’s survival struck me as phony, but the climactic shootout on the steet between Weiss, Anna, the gang, and an elderly neighbor who just happened to be watching feels like a slow-motion daylit nightmare even though it unfolds in real time. The violence is horrifying in its ease.

Then there’s the appearance of the monster—or non-appearance, since it rescues Cora and Bruno from one of the Steiner’s toxic-waste-moving henchmen and then yanks his body into the air while completely invisible. And there’s the way the episode dances back and forth between making Rico, Anna’s ex and the leader of the gang, sexy and poetic at one moment, then frightening and thuggish the next, the way one imagines such men probably seem to those around them. (It maps perfectly to Anna’s description of him, in fact.)

I dunno, folks, I really just don’t know. The more I watch the more I feel that Black Spot is just an extremely well-made primetime broadcast-network supernatural cop show that could be so much more. I suppose we’ll get to the bottom of it in the end.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream Black Spot Episode 5 ("The End Of The Road") on Netflix