Trauma, Motive and the Post-Troubles Psychopath in The Fall

Abstract

This article discusses the depiction of the serial killer, Paul Spector, in the BBC/RTÉ television series The Fall (2013–2016). It complements existing scholarship on the series’ female detective by considering how Spector’s construction as a Gothic villain and victim of institutional abuse inflects The Fall’s positioning as a transnational genre production. It focuses on the use of Belfast as a setting, taking into account its historical positioning as a “Noir” city, and discusses the series’ spatial politics in the context of the city’s more recent history of sectarian divisions. It places the “explanation” for Spector’s criminal activities in the context of the narrativization of clerical sexual abuse as specifically associated with the Irish Catholic church, and outlines the narrative turns the series is forced to take to reach its generically inflected conclusion. The discussion focuses on seasons one and two of The Fall as the most significant in terms of meaning-making.

“What Is This, the Seventies?” Spectres of the Past (and the Future) in Recent Northern Irish Television

“…When first aired on BBC2 in the spring of 2013, The Fall was an immediate hit with viewers, its blend of “noir” and “gothic” genres (Barton 2021, 36, 37) drawing the largest audiences the channel had enjoyed for almost a decade (Magennis 2016, 217). Set principally in Belfast, the program offers a depiction of the urban landscape that while “fresh” for the Northern Irish capital remains, as Charlotte Brunsdon (2018, 14) notes, “generically familiar for the television city: a place where women get murdered.” The series opens as we watch Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson clean her bathroom and remove a cosmetic face mask before retiring to bed to read up on a murder case which, among others, will consume her energies for months to come.…”

“…As so often in fictional representations of serial killers, Paul Spector appears, at first glance, to be entirely “ordinary” (Barton 2021, 33, 34). A seemingly mild-mannered grief counsellor, he is also married with two young children and clearly especially besotted with his daughter Olivia.…”

“…In hindsight, the scene in which the “bad year” monologue appears in series two is one of those that heralds the rapid decline of a series that had begun with considerable promise. The inability of the script writers to decide what to do with the plot line about Spector’s background as an abused child would prove emblematic of a broader, spiralling narrative incoherence 8 that would see the third and final season aired in 2016 rendered largely incomprehensible (Barton 2021, 33).…”

“…While the background of his mother and the residential homes to which he was assigned suggest Paul Spector to be Catholic, that designation is disrupted at certain moments in the series. In the opening season, for instance, he is called a “Jew boy” by loyalist Jimmy Tyler (Barton 2021, 42), while in the second his wife responds to his plea that she not terminate her pregnancy by enquiring: “Why not? We’re not Catholic.” Spector then replies that his mother, though, was a Catholic, a comment that does not appear to come as a surprise to his spouse and which is simply left hanging.…”