I have recently purchased the 9 DVD box set of The Eagle a Crime Odyssey and love it! It has already been on SBS for some time, but i was never able to watch the series one after the other, so found it difficult to keep track of the storyline. Now that i have the DVD box set, this has become much easier and i am finding it much easier to understand the storyplot and the reasons behind each episode.
The lead actor (Jens Albinus) is great. He plays the central character with great flair and you can understand and sympathise as to why Hallgrim Halligrimson ( the main character whom the show revolves around) behaves as he does. He has a brilliant mind and is basically a very kind, gentle person operating in a world that is anything but this. He is academically brilliant and speaks five different languages fluently but emotionally, is something of a basket case! He has a number of unresolved issues, two failed marriages and a string of broken/dysfunctional relationships that don't seem to improve with age or experience. The characters around him all seem to have their own emotional baggage. Ditte is a strugging single mother of three children. Frandsen is watching his wife slowly die of cancer. Marie had a brief but very intense sexual affair with Hallgrim that quickly turned sour, Micheal's life seems to revolve around his computer as his social/sex life seems to be non-existent. Nazim is divorced and a Muslim both paradoxes for his personal identity and as a minority in essentially white Denmark and Thea the head of the unit, struggles with her own issues relating to policing versus Government rules and rhetoric.
I haven't found much in the series that irks me. The theme music gets on my nerves occasionally. In one episode, they echoed it throughout the first ten minutes, and it nearly drove me nuts. The episode where Hallgrim is knifed to the heart, had some medical scenes that were glaringly wrong Whilst being operated on for a tear in his pericardium, (the sack that envelopes the heart) no attempt is made to cover the patients head. In real life, this would never happen, as the entire operating theatre would become an unsterile area. Also performing open heart surgery requires that you cut through the sternum, (breast bone) and then you use a bone seperator to push open the rib-cage. It is extremely painful and very very messy…Patients who have this surgery require morphine just so they can breathe without screaming and take weeks and weeks to recover, (the breast bone has to knit back together) Hallgrim is sitting up and fighting the baddies, a few hours after coming out of recovery. Either he is of superhuman strength or loaded up to the eyeballs with oxy-contin (dia- morphine.) Three days later he is out of the hospital and walking around................what the??? On day four, he is on a plane heading overseas.......in real life this would just not happen......
But hey this is television and at the end of the day, the script writers can put down whatever they want. Regardless of the few gripes that i have, on the whole the series is very tightly scripted and the acting and dialogue is excellent. The actors are well suited to their roles and i really enjoy watching the episodes. On a few occasions, i think there was a lost opportunity to flesh up the script.......(I thought the episode where Hallgrim was slipped liquid diazapham? (valium) into his cognac could have been written better and led to a few more twists and turns.......(kidnapped, poisoned, held for randsom...........team goes looking for antidote to poison/or finds out what the poison is.......a bit like what happened to that Russian spy who died from radiation poisoning............instead Hallgrim passes out on his dads lap in the back of a taxi and that is that???...........wasted opportunity for some good script writing i think?
Anyways........that's my review.................what do others think?
Ira.