Warning: SPOILERS lie ahead for Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole season 1, episode 1, “36 Seconds”!Harry has a very personal stake in his latest case after Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole‘s season-opening death.
Adapted from the bestselling crime thriller novel series, previously adapted into Michael Fassbender’s The Snowman, the Netflix series introduces Tobias Santelmann as the iconic Norwegian detective who, after he drunkenly crashed his car during a high-speed pursuit, has spent five years getting sober and trying to solve a bank robbery cold case. He’s been doing so with the help of fellow detective, Ellen Gjelten, all while building a relationship with Pia Tjelta’s Rakel, a single mother.
Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole kicks off with Harry getting a lead by tying a unique gun involved in the robbery to a local weapons smuggler, who he and Ellen track to a remote cabin in the woods. However, as Harry spends time with Rakel’s teen son, Oleg, Ellen goes to investigate herself, arriving just as Joel Kinnaman’s Tom Waaler, a fellow officer, begins trying to kill the smuggler to cover up his own involvement as a high-ranking figure in the smuggling operation. Tom subsequently kills Ellen and frames the other smuggler as being behind the murder before killing him.
Ahead of the show’s premiere, ScreenRant‘s Grant Hermanns interviewed Joel Kinnaman to discuss Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole. When asked about Ellen’s death and how it impacts Waaler, the star began by teasing that “we get to see a little bit of inner conflict” for his character, even as he had to balance his performance with the antagonist being “very mission-oriented.”
Kinnaman further shared that “there were some things that were cut out that were even more violent” from Ellen’s season-opening death, in which Waaler was shown “finding the vein in her forehead and then hitting that” in order to create “the right kind of blood splatter” to sell Tom’s cover-up. Even while it’s “real psychopathic behavior,” the star teased that Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole season 1 will see some of the emotional fallout for Waaler:
Joel Kinnaman: But then, [I was] also getting a human emotion in there as well and just like, “F–k, I really didn’t want to do this. This is really unfortunate.” There is a conflict there. I think it was interesting to find that balance where there are at least traces of empathy. And then, if it’s the frustration or sadness that Tom is feeling, is it more connected to that this makes things much more difficult now and “how am I going to clean this up?” or if it’s genuine empathy towards Ellen. Maybe it’s a little bit of both.
While the Netflix series primarily adapts the fifth installment in its source novel franchise, The Devil’s Star, Ellen’s death actually occurred two novels earlier in The Redbreast. While Nesbø himself has penned the show, the way that the character’s death plays out in Detective Hole comes with a few major changes from the book, particularly in who actually murders her, as the 2000 book saw her killed by a neo-Nazi with ties to the mysterious arms dealer, The Prince.
Moreover, Ellen’s death in The Redbreast came right on the heels of her discovering The Prince’s identity, being killed before she could share who it is with Harry, who only later pits Waaler as who he suspects the dealer to be in the 2002 novel, Nemesis. In Netflix’s Detective Hole, on the other hand, audiences are not only immediately told that Waaler is The Prince, but is the one who kills her to cover his identity up, and frames it on the dealer he’s hiding in his remote cabin.
While a key event in the books for Harry’s journey, Detective Hole has also tweaked how it impacts the titular detective. In The Devil’s Star, Hole is denied permission from his Chief Inspector to pursue an investigation into Waaler being both The Prince and tied to Ellen’s murder, leading to an alcohol-fueled downward spiral that also nearly results in his firing. In the show, however, the Chief Inspector approves his investigation, albeit with the caveat that he has to do so covertly.
With Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole also seeing its titular investigator getting roped into a serial killer mystery, his efforts to solve Ellen’s murder is sure to put him in a precarious emotional position with both cases. However, with The Devil’s Star also offering a proper sense of closure for her death, it will be interesting to see if the Netflix crime thriller will similarly close her case, or have it extend to be a multi-season arc the way it carried across multiple books.
Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole season 1 is available to stream in its entirety on Netflix.