‘Black Spot’ on Netflix Episode 7 Review: Swamped

If you’ve watched six episodes of Black Spot so far, it’s a fair bet you can figure out what’s going on in the seventh. For the most part, anyway—and it’s that “for the most part” that’s the key.

While its done-in-one mystery is as simplistic as ever, “The Secret Behind the Window” (note: no windows are involved) is much more concerned with the overarching mysteries—the secret of the woodsman, the disappearance of Marion Steiner, the dirty deeds her father and grandfather are up to—and with the emotions of the main characters. You don’t have to be a great detective to figure out that this is a marked improvement over its predecessors.

Let’s get the episodic mystery plot out of the way first, even though it’s actually one of the more creative ones, as far as it goes. When Villefranche’s doctor/surgeon/M.E./healer of all trades Leila pays a visit to a farm, she finds its owner’s developmentally disabled son playing a game of hide in seek in which he’s been counting to the 7,428 mark or something. She finds his dad badly wounded in the barn—he dies of his wounds in the hospital—while Camille, the rookie cop, discovers a ledger containing a secret code in his jacket pocket.

The codes are map coordinates. At each point on the map there’s a birdfeeder. In each birdfeeder there’s a bundle of cash. Behind each bundle of cash is a resident of the town who’s being blackmailed, via photos taken by the man’s unwitting accomplice, his shutterbug son. The only suspect they intercept during a dropoff and interview, an alcoholic trucker who eventually admits his secret wasn’t on-the-job drinking but killing his wife when she tried to leave him, winds up being the murderer of the blackmailer and the arsonist who prevents Weiss and Teddy Bear from retrieving photos taken the night of Marion Steiner’s disappearance.

So far, so open and shut. But the real emotional and narrative action takes place with Weiss, Steiner, and Cora, as each of them inches closer to the truth about Marion’s disappearance. When last we saw the Mayor, he was being carted off for questioning by Siriani about his whereabouts the day of Marion’s disappearance. Turns out he confronted her on the road and tossed her motorbike into a nearby pond, then left her to go to a secret meeting at a hotel the nature of which he will not reveal. He assumed she’d give up on her plan to run away and slink home, but she never made it, and a combination of guilt and cold political calculation prevented him from changing his story to reveal the truth about his final encounter with his daughter.

Weiss is absolutely gutted by Steiner’s dishonesty. Of course it turns out he wasn’t actually involved in the killing—that we know of anyway—but just the realization he could lie about something so important leaves her supine on the ground, literally wracked with grief.

As usual, Suliane Brahim’s torn-and-frayed performance and Julien Despaux’s use of space and location make this scene much more powerful than it has any right to be given the show’s overall weaknesses.

The same is true of romantic moments as well. Turns out that gorgeous silhouetted hook-up last episode was no fluke: Teddy Bear and his closeted firefighter/EMT boyfriend Paul finally dance in public in one of the sweetest scenes on the show to date, while the small cabin to which Bruno takes Cora for an assignation is so scenically situated it makes me want to sleep with the dude.

Still, I suspected that Black Spot‘s narrative neatness would link the two plotlines together—that whatever Steiner was doing at that hotel would have been captured by the blackmailer. But no, the climactic revelation is far more direct, and upsetting.

Acting on a tip from Leila, who says the blood samples Weiss took from what she believed to be the site of a break-in by the woodsman reveal high levels of psychoactive toxins from the belladonna plant, Weiss treks out into a swamp in the forest. Watched over by crows and sinking deeper with each step, she comes across her worst fear: Marion Steiner, dead, lying in repose amid a garden of bones.

The discovery takes place in what almost feels like slow motion due to Despaux’s stellar direction: Weiss must round a corner of reeds in order to see the corpse that we, the viewers, have been forced to look at already. It prolongs the horrible moment in a wrenching way.

It’s hard to feel the grief she feels, I’m afraid to say. Marion Steiner is unlike Laura Palmer, her obvious antecedent, in that we haven’t gotten to know her as a person, haven’t seen her move and laugh on a videotape, haven’t truly lived with the pain and love and loss her friends all feel for her.

Yet even though it took Black Spot seven episodes to get here, this material feels richer and sadder than anything that’s come before. If the finale delivers on this grim promise, maybe the mystery of why people should watch this show will come to a satisfactory conclusion.

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 7 ("The Secret Behind The Window") on Netflix