A heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
