On Sunday I watched an episode of Maigret on PBS. It's one of the recent ones starring Rowan Atkinson as the French police chief. From what I've seen, the shows are fairly good period mysteries, not quite a cozy, but at least not a soap opera like that stupid Grantchester. It's not "light" and jokey but also not bleak like those depressing Wallender shows either. Wallender most definitely turned me off any Scandinavian mysteries whatsoever.
I think Rowan is good at playing serious, in an understated way, but I wish Maigret's wife had more to do. I also really wanted to have some resolution about the plot with her friend whose policeman husband was cheating on her. The show seemed to have some really weird viewpoints on sexual politics and marriage.
SPOILERS
The particular episode was Night at the Crossroads, in which a dead man is found in the garage of a Danish man named Carl Anderson. Carl is disfigured from a cockpit fire and he mysteriously locks his sister into her bedroom every night. They were implied to be incestuous, but it later turned out that she wasn't his real sister. She was a former prostitute and now Carl's wife, but we never get an explanation why Carl would tell everyone this is his sister Else (who actually died years ago). I mean, unless it's a case of Stapleton in Hound of the Baskervilles, what would be the motive for a husband and wife to pretend to be brother and sister? Carl wasn't the one running a complicated criminal plot. And why does he think locking her in at night will protect his wife? Even if his goal is some kind of moral reform, with all the Bible reading and keeping her from temptation, his locking her in is only going to make her feel like a prisoner who has to escape, and indeed she does, getting involved in a criminal conspiracy to frame Carl for murder and to run away with the killer.
At one point Else/Emma even tries to smother Carl with a pillow after he somehow survived an attempt on his life. Maigret has to pull her off him and arrest her. Recovering in the hospital, Carl doesn't care about his wife's murderous plots and says he'll wait for her to get out of prison. Strangely, Maigret supports this notion and actually talks to Emma about how "he thinks he's doing good by saving you" and shouldn't she try to visit him, since "after all, he is your husband."
That's like, Whoa! What the hell are you thinking? Why would you encourage her to get back together with Carl, after you literally had to stop her from killing him? What makes you think that's a good idea to give her another opportunity to kill him? And just a few scenes before, Maigret had been talking to the killer about "what kind of woman" she was, and how he was a dupe for being "her ticket out" of small-town life. Besides, she doesn't "owe" Carl her love, due to his deeds and pining after her; if she doesn't love him, she shouldn't pretend to, out of obligation. Even if she did somehow magically change her feelings for Carl, Carl apparently wanted to keep locking her up and pretending they were siblings. That's no recipe for a happy, functional marriage; that's a disaster twisted out of religious fervor.
This ending so astonished me that I had to find out if Simenon's book had the same ending. I did find a detailed summary of the book online, and the TV show seems to be a mostly faithful adaptation, only changing some character names and adding a plot where Grandjean is cheating on his wife and about to leave her for the seductress. (The TV writers also changed a scene of Else getting attacked into Else attacking Carl.) The book does end with Carl wanting to wait for Else, saying "after all, she's my wife." But there's a difference between Carl being a stubborn deluded idiot, and Maigret approving of his delusion by trying to fix Carl back up with his runaway wife. As I said, I would have actually have preferred an ending scene with the cop's wife being comforted by Maigret's wife, than seeing Maigret's misguided visit to Else/Emma in jail. They should have just left Carl's ending at the moment that his estranged father came to visit him and finally accept his son back in the family.
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