Let’s not let it beat us: How season 3 of ‘The Fall’ does a disservice to its female characters
A press conference kicked off The Fall’s cat-and-mouse game. Early in the first season of the British crime drama, Gillian Anderson’s Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson addressed the media to detail an ongoing investigation into a series of murders. Late at night on his in-laws’ couch, serial killer Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) found his new obsession.
Spector’s fascination with the detective on his tail was explicitly linked to her femininity: A button on her blouse came undone at the start of that first conference. “She seemed so cool, so relaxed, so self-assured,” Spector later raved. “And I thought, ‘F — you, English bitch.’” Gibson went on to exploit the effect she had on the killer as a woman, painting her nails the same color as his victims’ before her next appearance on camera. Her power was in her ability to address him while he hid in the shadows.
In the third season, Gibson doesn’t hold a single press conference.
The latest season of The Fall, now on Netflix, strips Gibson of her power by subjecting her to a prolonged review of her actions in the season 2 finale, which ended with the shooting of both Spector and Detective Sergeant Tom Anderson (Colin Morgan). While Gibson is shuttled from meeting to meeting early in the third season, her every attempt to save lives called into question, her male colleagues are left to make statements in her stead. One promises another that he can “manage” her. Gibson is shamed, censored, ignored, and eventually brutalized.
The Fall has won praise for its feminism in the past thanks to its depiction of its female lead, an icy-cool head in a world of quick-tempered men. Much of Stella Gibson’s appeal comes from her refreshing refusal to obsess over the man she hunts; her only obsession is catching him. “He might fascinate you,” Gibson tells Anderson. “I despise him with every fiber of my being.”
That assertion is complicated in the aftermath of the shooting, when Gibson rushes to Spector rather than to her colleague, with whom she also happens to have had a sexual relationship. Although she is quick to insist, at the start of the third season, that her concern was practical — Spector needed to live because she wants to see him tried for his crimes — her actions tell another story to Spector’s lawyers, who tear apart DSI Gibson’s fixation with their client.
Even if Gibson’s actions are being misinterpreted, The Fall does not share her objectivity. The latest season is enamored with Spector’s recovery, opening with such extended, gruesome shots of his surgery that the season 3 premiere feels like a hospital drama’s backdoor pilot. Well-meaning surgeons rush to save his life. In one particularly exploitative move, Spector dreams that his daughter calls him back from joining his mother in the light. The camera lingers on a single tear escaping from his eye.
Spector emerges from his traumatic experience claiming not to remember anything past 2006, leading hospital staff to hover at his bedside with a series of inane questions about Twitter. His apparent amnesia is, for the sake of the investigation, treated as medical fact until late in the season, when his doctors are cleared to conduct brain scans that support what Gibson has assumed from the start: It’s very possible that Spector is faking or exaggerating his symptoms.
If only the season offered anything more conclusive than “very possible.” Spector never admits to lying about his memory loss, and even if he is, his slate has already been all but wiped clean. Defanged by his performative innocence, Spector shuffles around wide eyed. The hospital staff describes him as “docile.” His concerned young daughter, Olivia (Sarah Beattie), throws her arms around him at his bedside; later, he tells the story of coming home at a young age to find that his mother had killed herself. Now that he isn’t out in the world strangling women, Spector is redefined by, of all things, the love of the women in his life. Gibson, meanwhile, visits once with an elderly woman in the hospital; the woman is never revisited, and their relationship is never explained. The show seems to bank on Gibson’s appeal as an enigmatic figure to justify the loose ends in her story.
The Fall routinely sacrifices its female characters to Spector in its third season. His surviving victim, Rose (Valene Kane), suffers additional trauma when an inexplicable hospital error leads her to catch sight of him in the hallway. Spector’s nurse, a dead ringer for Rose, is dangled in front of him like bait; she exists to dare him to snap. When Spector does break in the finale — proving his nature if not the state of his memories — it’s at Gibson’s expense. He beats her senseless in an interrogation room, a hard-to-watch scene that puts too much emphasis on the reactions of the men around her. The most satisfying outcome of the attack is its effect on one of Spector’s lawyers, a woman, who backs out of the case — and possibly her career — rather than represent a man capable of such violence.
The third season is at its best exploring how women support one another: Gillian Anderson reveals the most of Gibson in her conversations with women. She encourages police officer Dani (Niamh McGrady) not to let their patriarchal workplace culture beat her. She comforts Rose and admits her fear that she inadvertently led Spector to Rose’s door. And she pushes troubled teen Katie (Aisling Franciosi), whose moody, cliché-laden obsession with the killer has long dragged down the story, to look for acceptance in the right places, opening up about her past self-harm in the process. In those interactions, Gibson’s unforced warmth positions her as a woman uniquely relevant to today’s political climate: one whose composed exterior is actually a carefully crafted necessity in a male-dominated field.
Gibson elaborates on the distance between a woman’s actions and emotions when Rose’s husband Tom (Jonjo O’Neill) asks why his wife went with Paul willingly. “Men always think in terms of flight or fight,” Gibson admonishes, framing acceptable behavior as a gendered construct. What may have looked like consent, she argues, was likely a product of Rose’s fear that if she fought back, her family would be harmed. Gibson pushes Tom not to judge his wife. Based on Rose’s later suggestion that her husband doesn’t seem to like her much right now, it seems that the detective’s pep talk fell on unwilling ears.
The men of The Fall routinely dismiss Gibson throughout the third season, and the consequences are disastrous. In addition to her beating, which could have been avoided if Spector were treated as a more serious threat, the department also ignores Gibson’s suggestion to drop the charges against Spector’s wife, Sally Ann (Bronagh Waugh), who initially provided her husband with a false alibi. A neonatal nurse, Sally Ann miscarried while in custody, and Gibson argues that the woman has been through enough. Her colleagues elect to prosecute anyway, and Sally Ann, pushed to the brink, attempts to drown herself and her children by driving into the incoming tide.
There is a not-insignificant message in the fact that Gibson is proven right: Sexism has deadly consequences. But the show responds to Sally Ann’s near suicide by dismissing her much as the men do — we leave her in her hospital bed, unresponsive, and the remaining two and a half episodes can’t spare a line of dialogue to follow up on her plight. Mrs. Spector’s desperation no longer serves her husband’s story. The most pivotal moment of her life isn’t even conveyed intimately; her drive into the water is captured on a bystander’s camera, and that footage — clinically replayed on the news — gives viewers our only perspective on the incident. Sally Ann, destroyed by her husband, is nothing but a spectacle.
And treating the women in his life as props does nothing to make Spector look less hollow. Before interrogating him in the season 2 finale, Gibson refused to let a male colleague write off their suspect as a monster, arguing that in her experience, “Men like Spector are all too human, too understandable.” Spector’s violent misogyny didn’t separate him from society; it bound him to it. In an attempt to reexamine Spector outside the bounds of his recent crimes, then, The Fall divorces him from the context that gives its story weight — arguably making him less human in the process.
It’s a balance that the show can’t maintain any more than its antagonist, who snaps when Gibson reveals that she has uncovered another of his victims. In 2002, prior to his purported memory loss, Spector accidentally asphyxiated a woman during sex, and a friend took the blame. At the reminder, he lashes out — first against Gibson, then against his psychiatrist, then against a fellow patient, whom he kills, and finally against himself. Spector ties a plastic bag around his head, subjecting himself to the same slow death as his accidental victim.
By that point, his so-called amnesia no longer matters. “‘Twas death and death and death indeed,” Spector recites in a poem to the man he later kills; the act of killing is final, regardless of its motives. Even if he keeps up the argument that he doesn’t remember murdering most of his victims, Spector can no longer claim not to know what it feels like to extinguish a life. His violent nature remains unchanged. But in allowing him to kill himself, The Fall elevates Spector above that nature, giving him the right to pass judgement on his own sins. This is exactly the sort of self-imposed justice Gibson hoped to avoid.
The season ends on an encouraging note: Gibson returns home to London, gathers up her mail, and settles down with a glass of wine. She opens the mail. Her life goes on — the return to everyday life might be jarring, but Gibson is shaken, not undone. She gets the final say by the very fact of her continued existence. Both Gillian Anderson and series creator Allan Cubitt have expressed interest in revisiting Gibson in a few years’ time, and if they do, the understated ending bodes well. But if Stella Gibson was never unraveled by her fascination with Paul Spector, The Fall has a long way to go to prove likewise.
