a police captain facing her maternal instinct

FRANCE 3 – THURSDAY 1^RE SEPTEMBER AT 9:10 P.M. – SERIES

But what else has she done? The first pictures of Out of season tend to prove that Marina Hands put herself in a bad situation, much worse than the trap of her own making that had closed on her character as a lying mother in myth. This time, her face frozen, dressed in overalls, wearing a sailor’s cap, she approaches the corpse of a young woman and grabs a circular saw. Serial killer? On pledge? No, police captain in the canton of Valais, as we learn after the inevitable card indicating: “two days ago”.

The first episode of this detective miniseries will end with the same macabre images, except that this time, we know. Captain Sterenn Peiry volunteered after the discovery of the body of a young woman in the Cimes resort (Puy-de-Dôme) where she raised her children, a boy, a girl, before a tragedy whose we will soon know all the details before he leaves the village. Despite the reluctance of her superior, Captain Peiry returns to the scene of her misfortune and finds her son who has spent the season there selling ski boots and flirting with another seasonal worker. The young man does not seem delighted to find his mother, until he makes a very big mistake at the wheel of the car that she has recklessly lent him.

Sterenn’s choice then becomes difficult between his maternal love and his police duty. The first sequence seems to indicate that she let the first win, thus following in the footsteps of many series heroes, starting with the magistrate played by Kad Merad in A man of honor. As we anxiously contemplate the very predictable five hours we are about to spend with the policewoman, a small reversal of the situation, at the end of this overloaded first episode, seems to announce the unexpected.

Dickensian coincidences

Out of season is punctuated with false hopes: the irruption of new characters – a slightly too clever French policeman (Sofiane Zermani), a grieving man full of dark pain (Jean-Hugues Anglade) – or the unexpected twists and turns of the script. But these twists get carried away to the point of discouraging attention. The more than Dickensian coincidences, the secondary intrigues end up giving a stiff neck by dint of springing in all directions. We end up being more interested in their reasons for being than in their mechanism. The first thing is to make a plot last for a very long time (mixture of family drama and ecological thriller) which would have easily fit into a single feature film.

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