TV Review: DNA – Series two

The first series of Danish detective series 'DNA' made for absorbing, if grim, viewing, landing during lockdown at a time of enforced isolation. A series dealing with trafficked babies, abductions and serial killers doesn't sound like a particularly appealing prospect, yet the way it used its multiple locations and multilingual actors made for an oddly compelling drama (see BioNews 1074).

Now I find myself transported back, with the second series, which finds Detective Rolf Larsen returning to work after a prolonged sabbatical in which he has traced, and befriended, his own missing child (the central story of series one). A quiet, self-contained man labelled a maverick by his superiors for his habit of cutting through bureaucratic niceties, Larsen is rebuilding his life after the disappearance of his baby daughter cost him his peace of mind and his marriage.

Nicely resisting the route of relationship tension, the writers at least bestow Larsen and his ex-wife with mutual understanding and kindness. She is now remarried to another kind man, Thorstein, and is expecting a baby: Larsen lives just across the road in an arrangement that is refreshingly grown-up and conflict-free.

The trouble is, heartbreak is only just around the corner for these good people. The baby, a girl, is premature and urgently needs a liver transplant. No suitable donor is available through the normal channels; this leads Thorstein, supported by Larsen, into the murky world of people trafficking.

In a truly horrific episode, human organs are found stored in a makeshift facility. Larsen again enlists the help of Claire, played by Charlotte Rampling, who is three days away from retirement working as a detective in Paris. Meanwhile, in Romania, 18-year-old Mario is trafficked out and into Denmark, in the hope of finding his sister who he believes has been sold into prostitution. Their story weaves in and out of the other narratives, using similar flashback and flashforward techniques as in the previous series, in a way that challenges the way the viewer follows the story.

This is a difficult watch, as it deals with poor young people from Vietnam and Romania being tricked into paying vast sums of money to be smuggled into affluent European countries where they are effectively used as slaves by brutal Romanian gang masters. These criminal gangs, it is revealed, represent only the bottom of the food chain; the villains at the top are the apparently urbane, respectable businessmen who have woven such intricate webs with their offshore companies and bank accounts that feed off the indentured labour of these young people, that the police struggle to bring them to justice.

Just as series one showed the complicity of the nuns in the baby trafficking operations being run out of Poland, series two also shows how vast wealth is built on exploitation by those who have the power to hide their murky criminality through legal loopholes. It deals with the way that those who are punished for acts of criminality are often coerced victims themselves, while the puppet masters evade justice without appearing to get their own hands dirty.

I watched each episode with an increasing sense of rage at the inhumanity and injustices inflicted upon young people whose initial misfortune is to be born in poverty, with few chances in life. The series deals sympathetically with this, giving us a charismatic young lead character, Mario, whose resourcefulness in the face of dire misfortune would, in another place and time, earn him a great education and prospects.

I felt uncomfortable about the young victims, nameless and abused, crammed into airless lorries, that are part of his narrative. The commodification of young bodies, for slave labour, for sex work, and for the harvesting of organs should indeed be a difficult watch. In a show that has many moments of reflection, the cruelty of fate and human beings is a central theme. If it were not for the warmth and goodness of many of the characters, it would be depressing indeed.

The geographical reach of the action is sometimes a mystery. How Larsen can commute between Copenhagen and Paris with apparent ease is one such conundrum, at one point preferring to catch a plane back home because his ex-wife is being terrorised by an intruder – seemingly without calling local Danish police for help. Another is how an 18-year-old with no driving licence and presumably no passport can drive an HGV across European borders.

Larsen's colleague, Neel, continues to wander into semi-deserted agricultural buildings alone and without police backup, as she did in the first series. Some editing decisions seem to have been made specifically to create more tension at the vast expense of plausibility. Larsen's inexplicable decision to leave his ex-wife in the dark about the fate of their lost daughter is another problem that has a whiff of artificiality about it.

These are small niggles in what is overall an enjoyable and compelling series. I suspended my disbelief and cared enough about the characters to binge-watch the six episodes all the way to their satisfying conclusion.