Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Young Wallander: Killer’s Shadow’ On Netflix, Where Kurt Wallander Comes Back To The Force To Investigate A New Case

In 2020, Netflix gave us a joint British-Swedish prequel for Henning Mankell’s character Kurt Wallander. And it wasn’t bad! The only issue was that Young Wallander himself wasn’t quite as interesting as everything else that was going on around him. Will a second season, with a new mystery, make the young version of Wallander a character worth watching?

YOUNG WALLANDER: KILLER’S SHADOW : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man paints complex figurines in his flat, then he gets ready to go out for the night.

The Gist: At the club, he meets his friend and they talk about a deal that’s about to go down. The friend initiates a fight with the bouncers which gets the man, Anton (Lewis MacKinnon), a punch in the nose. Outside, he meets a young woman named Katja (Kim Addis), and they walk to get a coffee. But in a narrow alleyway, a car chases them; Anton pushes Katja out of the way but gets run over and killed instantly.

Kurt Wallander (Adam Pålsson) wakes up in the middle of the night; he leaves the side of his girlfriend Mona (Ellise Chappell), drinks and thinks of the explosion that killed Superintendent Hemberg (Richard Dillane). He ends up going to his grave, and finds his old partner, Frida Rask (Leanne Best) there. He’s seriously thinking of leaving the Malmö police department; Rask is pissed that Wallander is giving up.

After some contemplation, he decides to come back, but things have changed in the division; Hemberg’s replacement, Samuel Osei (Tomiwa Edun), wants protocol to be followed at all times, with the purpose of getting the underserved populations to trust the police again. Rask assures Osei that Wallander is a good detective, even if he’s thwarted protocol in the past, but Osei will judge that himself. When Wallander returns, he’s greeted warmly by the squad, including his old partner, Reza Al-Rahman (Yasen Atour).

Rask brings him in on a hit-and-run case; the face was in such bad shape that all Wallander has to go on when he canvases people is the shirt he was wearing. But that somehow leads him to Katja, whom he has to chase in order to find out what happened when she was with him that night. After an address is extracted from the victim’s phone, Wallander goes to his apartment, where he’s greeted by Anton’s friend, who has been desperately wondering where Anton is.

After Wallander loses the guy in a chase, he’s called into the District Court, where he meets Osei for the first time. It’s there that he finds out that Anton is actually Elias Fager, who was involved in Rask’s first case in major crimes.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Season 1 of Young Wallander, of course. But this is also a good place to remind everyone that Kurt Wallander, from Henning Mankell’s series of novels, has been portrayed in a number of different series, including by Kenneth Branagh. This is a young version of Wallander, hence the name of the series.

Our Take: One of the things we didn’t love about the generally-well-written first season Henning Mankell’ of Young Wallander is that Wallander himself seemed to be the least interesting character in the show. That issue was solved by the explosion that killed Hemberg; now Wallander has baggage, to the point where he wonders if he still wants to be a cop. It’s just enough to make Wallander more interesting to watch as he solves another case using his copious investigative skills.

Writers Chris Lunt and Micheal A. Walker have done a good job of starting a new case with only a little bit of carryover from season 1. And, as we said, that carryover helps round out Wallander’s character, as he sits there with regret about Hemberg’s fate and the fact that Gustav Munck (Alan Emrys) more or less got away with murder. This new case, while linked to Rask’s past, doesn’t seem to be linked to the first season case, giving viewers who didn’t watch season 1 an easy way into the show.

We’re also expecting a lot of conflict between Wallander and Osei, who wants to play by the book. That’s where the topicality that we saw in the first season comes into play; whereas immigration was the overarching theme of season 1, the mistrust of cops by most of Sweden’s population of people of color will likely be the topic of season 2. How well the topic integrates with the central case is still to be determined.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Wallander and Osei tell Rask that the dead guy in the hit-and-run is Elias Fager, and she flashes back to a scene from that case.

Sleeper Star: Tomiwa Edun as Wallander’s new boss Samuel Osei. He definitely will bring a different dynamic to season 2’s story.

Most Pilot-y Line: Some of the connections Wallander made to get to Fager’s apartment were a little to neat and easy, but that’s a police procedural for you.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Young Wallander is a bit more interesting in Season 2 because now Wallander has some baggage he needs to deal with. Whether the story itself is better than the first season’s mystery is still up in the air.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.