This article contains major spoilers for the ending of Young Wallander Season 2.
Despite the first season not being particularly well received, Netflix nonetheless renewed Young Wallander for a second outing, and the good news is that it’s much improved! With less political commentary and a more propulsive, engaging mystery, it’s a good time for fans of Scandi crime dramas, and the more substantive character development will certainly give the show additional legs if Netflix is looking at commissioning a third season (there’s certainly no shortage of source material.) So, let’s take account of what happened in the second season.
The inciting incident is, predictably, a murder. It’s a hit-and-run that is obviously intentional to the audience but not quite so to the police, at least until further details about the victim are revealed. His name is Elias Fager, a man who, in his youth, made the news alongside his older brother Soren for beating and killing a teacher named Moberg. Soren was recently released from prison after serving a lengthy stint for the crime, but Elias avoided such punishment because he was a minor at the time. On the night he died, Elias met with Soren and told him that he had something important to tell him. He never got the chance to.
Elias was with a woman named Katja when he died. It seems like a chance encounter, but it’s eventually revealed to be anything but. Before Katja can reveal any details, though, she’s killed, causing even greater stress for Wallander, who is investigating the case and was already reluctant to return to work after the events of the first season.
So, the bulk of these six episodes is about exposing the connection between Elias, Soren, Katja, and whoever would be willing to kill them. As Wallander, Rask, and Reza investigate officially, Soren also begins to conduct his own inquiries. It all leads back to the teacher, Moberg, who is exposed through one of his victims, Alexia, as a pedophile. He abused the girls on his swim team, and thanks to letters discovered in Elias’s apartment that thank him for helping “save her life”, it seems obvious that he has a connection with another of Moberg’s victims. Thus, the case becomes about exposing who that fellow victim was.
As it turns out her name is Amelia, or Mia, a lawyer who has been working with Wallander’s girlfriend, Mona, and who is the daughter of the attorney general, who was the defense attorney for the Fager brothers after Moberg’s death. Another suspect emerges in Petterson, a former soldier who an increasingly unstable Reza (he still has PTSD from the first season) realizes was the driver of the car that killed Elias. How are these two connected? Well, both met while recovering from PTSD in a program funded by Mia’s father. Mia asked Petterson for help, and he made things worse by taking them too far.
But what did Mia need help with? Well, it takes a while for us to get that far. Eventually, Petterson is arrested while trying to ambush Soren with a sniper rifle, but he refuses to reveal anything about Mia. When she’s brought in for questioning, her father, Edwin, gets her out of there quickly. But at Elias’s funeral, Soren manages to ambush her and hold her at knifepoint, so she reveals the whole story. She convinced Elias to attack Moberg as revenge for him abusing her, and he knew he could get a drunk Soren to come along and do the deed for him. After the beating, Soren passed out, so Elias went to Mia for help. When she saw Moberg badly wounded in the sauna, she locked him inside and left him to die, and Elias protected her by claiming that Soren committed the crime. Edwin has been buying Elias’s silence ever since. Soren served eight years for a crime he didn’t commit.
This is the secret that Mia was trying to protect by enlisting Petterson’s help. Even following her confession, she and her father are untouchable; she was a minor at the time of the crime, and Edwin hasn’t been implicated in any wrongdoing. Soren will receive substantial damages for his wrongful imprisonment, but he’ll still have to be held to account for violating his parole. It’s not an ideal conclusion, but it’s the best anyone is going to get, as another season of Young Wallander ends on another realistically dour note.
