![]() Rossif Sutherland (son of Donald, half-brother to Kiefer) switches seamlessly between French and English as Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache’s deputy. “Three Pines” maintains the French-Canadian flair of the books. The ambivalence Tailfeathers delivers the line with makes me hope that’s a thread the show will continue to explore. Lacoste explains to a witness, another Indigenous woman, that she joined the Sûreté thinking she could do some good. It’s a clever intro to the eight-episode series, quickly introducing Gamache, the conflicts he has within the Sûreté, and what I assume will be the season’s overarching plot – the disappearance of Blue Two Rivers – the failure to investigate it.Ĭentering the stories of missing Indigenous women – a sadly timely and too often ignored issue – is a smart move for the show’s producers, who also worked on Netflix’s “The Crown.” It makes a plotline Penny wrote in the early 2000s about police abuse on Native reservations relevant while maintaining a connection to the source material.īuilding on that decision is the casting of Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, a member of the Kainai First Nation, as Isabelle Lacoste, one of Gamache’s deputies. He then drives a group of the marchers home, listening as they describe the Sûreté’s unwillingness to look for their missing family member, Blue Two Rivers. When Gamache sees Sûreté officers turn on the protestors, he quickly intervenes and condemns his colleagues’ behaviors. Francouer dismisses the demonstrator’s concerns, and Gamache quickly rebukes him. Gamache and his superior, Superintendent Francouer, watch from inside Sûreté’s headquarters as a group of protestors call on the agency to investigate the thousands of cases of missing Indigenous women. Most critically, “Three Pines” establishes Gamache’s innate goodness in the pilot’s first scenes. Molina plays Gamache with a seriousness that ensures his tendency to spout off words of wisdom comes off as genuine, rather than saccharine or overdone. ![]() It’s love with no place to go.” He quotes literature, in these episodes Frankenstein, liberally and believes that murder cannot be solved on an empty stomach. He says things like, “Grief feels like fear, but it’s not. Still, longtime Penny fans should rest assured that “Three Pines” keeps Gamache’s core personality traits. I’m hoping they get more fleshed out as the series progresses. These characters, so rich and complex in the books, fall flat here. We watch as the inspector takes in the kooky villagers – one carrying a pet duck – gawking at outsiders coming into their village. Gone are the scenes of Sûreté officers dining at the homes of Three Pines residents, making friends and investigating murders at the same time, and the scene of Gamache driving into Three Pines for the first time gave me “Twin Peaks” vibes. The beats of the mystery mostly mirror A Fatal Grace, the second book in the Gamache series, although, as Ruth Zardo’s line implies, the series draws a firm line between the detectives and the townsfolk. Gamache declares it the “perfect crime” and all the villagers suspects. The victim is a miserable woman who has chosen to live in a building that was previously a residential school where Indigenous children – abducted from their families – were abused in the name of “re-education.” No one – not her husband, child or neighbors – liked CC, who was electrocuted at a Boxing Day curling match (the series is set in Canada, after all). The first two episodes, premiering on Amazon on December 2, follow Gamache, played masterfully by Alfred Molina of Doc Ock fame, and his team solve the murder of CC de Poitiers.
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