![]() It has a further advantage of basically adhering to a known formula while sitting slightly at odds with it. It is slow without being frustrating or dull, thoughtful without being ponderous or pretentious. You probably do not need to be told this.Ĭardinal provides that rare pleasure: a sense of something being better than it needs to be. With no apparent connection between the dead, the detectives turn to Sheila’s past for clues. A second victim follows in the next episode (shown as an opening double bill). Robert is found chained to a log, dead from exposure. Cut a deal, he says, and they will find the lawyer before he dies.Īlas, Wade is knifed through the brainstem before his knowledge can be disbursed. When Sheila gets a ransom call from an unidentified man, she pays it without consulting the detective duo, but they track the payment to a man called Wade, who promises he can tell them where Robert is. His wife, Sheila Gagne (a politician, played by Carmen Moore, who attracts her own fair share of enemies), assures the detectives that they had an open marriage and that she knew about the date, but his lover’s husband did not. The only possible clue is a single brown feather. This time it is a high-profile lawyer – crown prosecutor Robert Quillen – who is abducted from a hotel room where he had just enjoyed an assignation with a woman not his wife. So it is up to Cardinal and Delorme to make meaning and insist that murder matters. A weak spot in the ice and you are done for. The unforgiving cold freezes corpses in painful attitudes, fresh snowfall obscures tracks that might have led somewhere or to someone. The petty vengeances of man play out against the ultimate, implacable, uncaring foe. It adds a sense of scale and an intensity to the (lean, muted) action that US or UK equivalents have to struggle to achieve. Everyone must don their parkas or hurry between car and truck lest mother nature, rather than a vengeful killer, get them. Even murderers must plan ahead and bring snowsuits for those they kidnap from their homes if they want them to stay alive long enough to make a ransom video. The relentless freezing temperatures constrain people at every turn. It is generally an unbearable piece of pseudery to say that the location of a programme is another one of its characters (OMG! NYC just WAS the fifth lady in SATC!) but in Cardinal it is very close to the truth.
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