Netflix’s Scandi noir The Glass Dome pulls double duty as both a taut whodunnit and a psychological drama, exploring the longstanding effects of intergenerational trauma in the face of a new local mystery with eerily similar contours to a long-ago crime. It’s a compelling example of a familiar form that provides all the binge-ready qualities you might expect, with twists, turns, and red herrings aplenty across Episodes 1-6, all the way to a bleak but ultimately satisfying ending.
And that’s where we come in. Let’s unravel all of the interconnected plot threads, reveal some closely-guarded secrets, and figure out who did what – and perhaps more importantly, why.
Episode 1
As with any Scandi noir, the opening episode is all about establishing the particulars. It introduces us to our protagonist, Lejla, a criminologist working in the U.S. who is suddenly summoned back to her remote hometown of Granås, Sweden. And it introduces us to that place, a close-knit, isolated community currently in uproar about the activities of a local mine – and pretty soon, the disappearance of a little girl.
This is of particular concern to Lejla since flashbacks and dialogue make it clear that, as a child, she was abducted herself and kept in a glass box until her eventual escape from a kidnapper who was never identified. She also knows the latest victim, Alicia, the daughter of her friend Louise, who Lejla finds dead in her bathtub, apparently by suicide. Louise was married to Said, who is intimately connected to the mine, and soon after that, Alicia’s clothes and shoes are found near one of its entrances.
This premiere also teases some character dynamics. Lejla was adopted by the former police commissioner, Valter, with whom she still enjoys a close relationship (less so, it’s implied, with his now late wife Ann-Marie, whose funeral Lejla came home to attend). The new police chief is Valter’s brother, Tomas, who is a lot more antagonistic. And Lejla is still well-known locally, mostly for her experiences as a victim, meaning the onus will quickly shift to her to solve the latest case.
(L to R) la Langhammer as Jorun and Johan Rheborg as Thomas in The Glass Dome/Glaskupan Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
Episode 2
As if it wasn’t clear that bad things are afoot, the birds are falling from the sky, dead, in Episode 2 of The Glass Dome. It’s a curiously unexplained omen that recurs as a visual motif throughout the episode, which also ends with a siren being sounded, warning of some kind of contamination emergency. Windows are to be closed. Tap water is to be avoided. The birds are just the start.
Despite all this, the investigation into who killed Louise and kidnapped Alicia continues on two fronts. On the one hand, we have Lejla and Valter nosing around and asking questions, and on the other,r we have Tomas trying to pin everything on Said. Louise had apparently filed for divorce, and Said wasn’t forthcoming with that information, which makes him a suspect.
We eventually see how these two plots come together. Lejla and Valter find out that Alicia had been friendly with a builder who worked on Louise and Said’s property. The guy, Maksim, is based out of a rural encampment run by a hatchet woman named Daniela, but he’s not guilty of anything – he has a ten-year-old daughter, and she and Alicia would send each other silly videos back and forth. But one of those videos shows Louise in the background with a man who is not Said, and that man turns out to be Tomas. Oops.
Tomas eventually confesses this to Lejla and Valter, but he wants them to keep it quiet. He clearly has anger issues and, it’s implied, a problem with booze, so he’s ill-suited to be leading the case on multiple levels. But the toxicology reports have proved that Louise was indeed murdered, and someone has to have done it.
An incidental suspect emerges in the form of Martin, a guy Lejla met on the search for Alicia, who seems to be a big admirer of hers. But this is more a personal theory of mine for now, rather than anything strongly indicated by the show itself. Understandably, Lejla is mostly focused on her own experiences, seeing strong parallels, suffering from flashbacks – probably not helped by the mushrooms she keeps taking – and watching back old tapes of her interviews with the police shortly after she escaped. She called her kidnapper “Ecki” because of the sound the light made when it was turned on. Apparently there were three children there before her, evidenced by their drawings, and Ecki gave her a doll as a gift. He also cut her hair when she was “about to die”.
Is Alicia in the same position? Maybe. At the end of the episode, Kristina receives a video of her asleep in bed, presumably from the kidnapper.
(L to R) Johan Hedenberg as Valter and Léonie Vincent as Lejla in The Glass Dome/Glaskupan Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
Episode 3
The third episode of The Glass Dome takes a handful of serious swerves, suggesting more mysteries, more suspects, and more danger. The siren at the end of the previous episode is revealed to have been alerting everyone to a wastewater leak from the mine, which worsens the already negative sentiment around the place and forces Kristina to suspend all operations. It also makes a target of Said, who’s later assaulted outside his home by several masked men, one of whom he suspects to be Taga’s son, Jim.
But if nothing else, Said has been exonerated in his wife’s murder, since his phone was in Stockholm at the time it occurred. Tomas is apologetic, as well he might be. But things still aren’t running smoothly between them, and probably won’t be any time soon, since Said finds a sexy note in one of Louise’s books, tipping him off to the affair (though not who with), and when Lejla takes him to the police station after the assault, he hands the note to Tomas as a potential lead in Louise’s murder.
While she’s at the station, Lejla bumps into the receptionist, Aino, who has been forced to bring her daughter, Isla, to work with her on account of the wastewater emergency. Aino’s husband, Adde, is missing, and has been since he turned up at home with a bunch of money. The rumour is that the mine was deliberately sabotaged in an effort to get the place shut down, and that it may be connected to what happened to Louise and Alicia. Lejla tells Valter to take Isla home so she and Aino can look for Adde at his father’s woodland hunting cabin.
The theory is proved correct – Adde was paid to sabotage the mine, and the email that sent him the instructions came from the same server as the video Kristina received of Alicia. Adde is too strung out to reveal anything more, and Jim, who is interviewed by Tomas on suspicion of assaulting Said, is an awful racist waste of space but claims to be otherwise innocent of any wrongdoing.
In a pretty shocking climax, Lejla and Aino get back to Valter’s house, where Isla is drawing in Lejla’s room. One of the sketches depicts a child locked in a glass box. When Lejla asks who drew it, Isla claims it was a man named Ecki who came in through the window. As if it wasn’t obvious that Lejla’s past was connected to everything going on in the present day, now we know, and on that note, it’s pretty clear that Valter is lying to her about her mother’s suicide, too.
Léonie Vincent as Lejla in The Glass Dome/Glaskupan Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
Episode 4
With Ecki getting a little too close for comfort in the previous episode, the police are now actively investigating the possibility of a connection between Alicia’s disappearance and Lejla’s back in the day. Isla gives a vague description of him having a red “flower” painted on his arm, but otherwise it’s difficult to narrow down the search beyond Lejla’s profile of him, which suggests a fetish for power and a consistent victim profile of young girls with long, dark hair.
By Lejla’s estimation, something must have happened in Ecki’s life recently to reignite his addiction to kidnapping and murder – he needs his ego boosting. Lejla later theorizes that he might have an additional, undiscovered victim, a “first attempt” he was ashamed of. She figures it might be a young girl who fits the profile, but was found with her face obscured by a plastic bag, suggesting Ecki needs to dehumanize his victims to come to terms with killing them.
Episode 4 of The Glass Dome builds to the biggest reveal yet, and you can see it coming a mile away. Lejla happens to run into Martin again – he intercedes on her behalf when Jim is not-so-subtly threatening her about Adde’s apprehension – just as the police hit on a lead. Ecki has kidnapped another girl and left the police a voicemail message claiming credit. In the background can be heard the distinctive flow of water, leading the police to a dam owned by an elderly woman named Vanja Frick.
As Lejla and Martin get cozy, go out for a drink, and then leave the bar for his isolated cottage in the middle of nowhere, the police raid Vanya’s home and discover evidence that her great-nephew, Daniel Frick, was committed to forensic psychiatric care after a failed attempt at kidnapping an 11-year-old girl. He was recently released. And he is, of course, Martin.
The episode ends with Lejla realizing too late that she has been drugged and collapsing onto the floor after seeing Martin’s livid red birthmark that looks like a painted flower.
(L to R) Johan Hedenberg as Valter in The Glass Dome/Glaskupan Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
Episode 5
For the second time in her life, Lejla manages to escape her kidnapper, at least in part because he flees the scene. But Martin/Daniel’s disappearance doesn’t reassure her. She, like me, thinks Daniel Frick is a copycat and the real Ecki is still out there, which is probably why Elma returns home to her parents but Alicia, crucially, does not.
For a while, Lejla is too strung out to do anything about it, and accidentally mentions Ecki to Said, who takes the information to Tomas. Tomas’s constant mishandling of the case is wearing thin, and that becomes a major theme in The Glass Dome Episode 5, leading to some new conclusions.
When Daniel Frick is found dead on the Svea Vanadin site, having been bled like an animal and hung upside-down from a crane, Tomas settles on Jim as the prime suspect. The audience is privy to extra information here, which is that he had returned home the previous night drunk and covered in blood, only for his father to slap him around and dispose of any potentially troubling evidence. He also steps in when Tomas confronts Jim at work, though he does confiscate his boots, which are covered in blood.
Lejla’s theory is confirmed when a chunk of her own hair is mailed to Valter’s house. This prompts the police to reopen the investigation, combining all the evidence in Alicia’s disappearance with everything Valter dug up in Lejla’s, which also leads to Valter being temporarily reinstated and taking over. Tomas doesn’t love this development, especially when Jim is ruled out by the blood on his boots belonging to an elk, and goes to drown his sorrows in a local bar.
Tomas gets very drunk, tells Said about him and Louise, and eventually has to be taken home by Valter. In his inebriated state, he mentions Valter having killed some fox cubs when they were children, but Valter corrects him, saying it was actually Tomas who did that. I’m not convinced – I think Valter is gaslighting his brother here, but we’ll see.
In the meantime, Lejla hits on another lead after listening to her mother’s interview tapes. She stayed at Daniela’s place before Lejla was kidnapped, which she’s able to confirm. But she also discovers that Tomas was staying there at the same time. Back at Valter’s house, she also discovers a family photo where it turns out that the brothers’ mother was suspiciously similar to the profile of Ecki’s victims. Since Lejla had earlier theorised that the obsession with long dark hair probably came from childhood, this further implicates Tomas (or, of course, Valter).
(L to R) Johan Rheborg as Thomas and Farzad Farzaneh as Said in The Glass Dome/Glaskupan Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
Episode 6
All the answers are finally revealed in Episode 6 of The Glass Dome, and while at this point most of them are pretty predictable, it still makes for a compelling ending to the twisty story that has been playing out.
The bulk of the finale operates on the basis of Tomas being the prime candidate for Ecki before eventually pulling the rug and revealing it was Valter all along. We predicted this, of course, and I suspect most people will have done so, but it’s more about the impact this has on Lejla when the truth is finally presented to her.
Before that, she visits Tomas, is unsatisfied by his explanation of why he was staying at the campsite when she was kidnapped – he says it was for his mother’s funeral, and that he wasn’t welcome in the house – and then, damningly, finds Louise’s phone at his place. She takes it and flees, calling Said in the meantime, asking him to call her but not to tell the police or Tomas anything about it.
From there, it appears that Tomas sedates Lejla from behind and takes her away, but it’s really Valter. Lejla wakes up back in the glass box, alongside Alicia. Realizing she still has Louise’s phone, she gets Alicia’s help to unlock it and calls Valter, which is what summons him to the basement on his property, where the glass box has been located all this time. He takes the phone away and then takes Alicia out of the box, cutting her hair in front of Lejla.
While this is going on, Jorun and Said confront Tomas back at the station about Lejla having Louise’s phone, so he heads over to Valter’s place in the hopes of explaining himself to Lejla. He initially buys Valter’s ruse that she’s upstairs and doesn’t want to speak to him, but he eventually goes up and finds Bjorn dead in Lejla’s room, still clutching the evidence that ties Valter to Ecki. Tomas realizes what’s going on and calls for backup, heading downstairs to Valter’s secret lair.
While Tomas is searching, Valter begins to strangle Alicia in front of Lejla, but she repeatedly bangs her head against the glass to make him stop. Tomas arrives, and Valter tries to make him shoot him in the head. He doesn’t seem to be able to, though, and the camera cuts away. When Jorun, Said, and the rest of the police force arrive, they hear gunshots, and Tomas emerges with Alicia and Lejla, both of whom are alive.
In an epilogue, Lejla goes to visit the now wheelchair-bound Valter in prison, asking where the remains of the other girls are. With an assurance that he will continue to live inside Lejla’s head, he implies he dumped the other victims in the river. When the police dredge it, they find the remains. Lejla seems to leave Granås for good, which is probably for the best, all things considered.
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