‘Black Spot’ on Netflix Season Finale Recap: Death and the Maidens

From the start, Black Spot has been a case study in how the whole can be equal or less than the sum of its parts. Lush location filming and thoughtful character work that tells much of the emotional story simply via well lit closeups on their faces, juxtaposed with perfunctory mysteries and recycled horror imagery: The combination frustrates because anyone capable of pulling off the former ought to know better than serving up the latter.

Titled “The End Is Only the Beginning” with almost maddening bluntness, the show’s cliffhanger season finale offers yet more evidence of this irritating tendency. Yet for once, the surprise reveals are—almost—as good as anything else on the show. Making it work in the final hour is a mystery alright, but it’s a happy one despite it all.

There’s no need to belabor what we learn about the death of Marion Steiner. She’s been dead for months, and she died quickly of what seem like multiple blunt-force wounds. Her unusual preservation is due to the high-acid low-oxygen composition of the bog in which she was found, the sort from which many pseudo-mummified corpses from throughout history have been retrieved. Everyone in town seems completely gutted by her death, despite the fact that every single one of them has to know at least four different murder victims by now. Mayor Steiner, gassed up by his tyrannical father Gerard, rallies the family goons to nearly kill Bruno, the environmental militant at whose campsite Cora found Marion’s scarf. The innocent activist is saved at the last minute by Weiss, who clips her friend and lover in the leg to stop him.

Also, Camille the rookie cop shoots her boss Weiss multiple times to cover up the truth, which is that she killed Marion and tossed her in the bog to cover it up.

Wait…what?

In a genuinely shocking twist that nonetheless does feel consistent with, if not particularly foreshadowed by, Camille’s character as we’ve come to know her, we learn that the adorable young gendarme has been a mole for Gerard Steiner, keeping an eye on both the police department and the environmental activists with whom they often spar. She was assigned to root out the spy in the Steiner ranks, and neither she nor her paymaster had any idea the spy would be Marion. When Camille tried to brace her for information, she slipped and fell to her death down an embankment of rocks. The body was retrieved and posed by persons/monsters/woodsmen unknown, most likely to expose the crime and the underlying conspiracy.

After shooting (I won’t say “killing” for reasons which will soon become apparent) her boss, Camille pulls herself together and heads back to the station. In walks Cora, searching for a USB key that Bruno says Marion had promised to deliver him on the day she disappeared, containing Gerard’s master plan. Camille offers to take cora out to the swamp to search for it. When Cora finds it and hands it over, Camille pulls her gone to commit yet another murder, somewhat apologetically. It’s clear she’s cracking under the pressure.

That’s when a murder of crows swoops in to attack her after spying on her all season, giving Cora a chance to grab an antler from the animal bones all around them and impale Camille. She dies sitting up, eyes open, propped up by the murder weapon.

It’s fuckin’ wild, man.

All in all, this is as strong a resolution to this storyline as it’s possible to get for a show that’s handicapped itself over its first season the way this one has. The surprise attack on Weiss, the suspense between Camille and Cora, the stark swamp setting, the crows—it’s fine genre work across the board.

And it’s smartly juxtaposed with Mayor Steiner’s final embrace of his own scumminess, as he abandons his grieving (and, as it turns out, pregnant) wife to show up to a town council meeting in order to thwart a rebellion by Sabine’s environmentalist faction and sell the town on the toxic waste dump he and his dad have secretly been preparing in a nearby quarry all this time. Watching the lives of multiple women get tossed around like jacks while this creep lies about the poison that’s literally forming small lakes of lethal filth just a mile or two away is appropriately infuriating.

Ah, but then there’s this.

And this.

Clicking and chattering like a million other, better realized monsters, the antlered woodsman buries Weiss’s body in a blanket of moss, leading to a hackneyed “in the final moment the dead character opens their eyes” ending. Once again, any hope that violence against our main characters might wind up meaning something is vain.

Black Spot has a strong, quiet cast that does great work with what they’re given. It’s as good at landscapes and intimate closeups as any show you’d care to name right now. I mean, look at this:

But as long as it keeps both telegraphing and pulling its punches, depending on the episode, it’s never going to feel worthy of the raw material with which it’s working. It will never see the forest for the trees.

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 8 ("The End Is Only The Beginning") on Netflix