Cracker

Robbie Coltrane's convincingly damaged detective

The damaged detective, alone with the case and their choice of anesthetic. It’s a cliché, of course. But what’s curious is how rarely the damaged detective is actually damaged.

They might chug alcohol, they might alienate their spouse, and they might throw themselves entirely into a case to the point they only relate to the killer. But at the end, they look and sound like the movie stars who play them. They’re fine. They always were.

There are many ways to damage yourself, of course, but at the end of eleven seasons, House still looks like Hugh Laurie with five o’clock shadow. Bruce Willis, on the edge in Die Hard 3 and The Last Boy Scout, is never so on the edge he can’t find his way back. Jane Tennison from Prime Suspect battles alcoholism and loneliness, but at the end of the day still looks like Helen Mirren.

“I drink too much. I smoke too much. I gamble too much. I am too much.”

Any of the above characters could speak those lines, but only Edward “Fitz” Fitzgerald, played by Robbie Coltrane, could wring any truth out of them.

Fitz, the psychologist turned profiler Coltrane played for three seasons on Cracker, is the rare detective who actually seems close to going off the rails. You can find characters who imbibe more, who do much more heinous things. But none embodies damnation-through-compulsion quite the way Coltrane does. The character isn’t a complete shambles, but he’s shambolic, destroying himself and his family, his relationships, his career. Worse, he’s smart enough to know this, and too bored to change.

Part of that is physical. Coltrane was fat, and Fitz is fat. On his death, the star of Harry Potter and James Bond was treated to size-based encomiums from the industry: he was “a mountain of a man,” a “giant,” had “an oversized heart,” etc. That’s what you have to look forward to, in the best case scenario, when you’re overweight and in showbiz.

Fitz physically fits the profile of the person who overindulges, and we believe the bottles of blended Scotch are damaging his liver in a way that we don’t with Jessica Jones. He smokes, he gambles, he wrecks parties by asking his wife’s friends what they really think and feel—and when they’re not honest, telling them what they’re feeling. It’s the David Thewlis character from Mike Leigh’s Naked with more heft and more to lose.

Voltaire said he could never conceive of a sin he couldn’t commit. Fitz adheres to the same philosophy. When his boss DCI Bilborough (Christopher Eccleston) is murdered, he tells his coworker and lover Detective Panhaligon (Geraldine Somerville) that he knows what she’s feeling. Not grief, but wistfulness: she harbored romantic feelings for her boss, but now that he’s gone and it’s impossible to act on them, she’s decided to ‘live for the moment.’ Hidden urges which lead to bargaining—dishonesty, but perhaps necessary to process grief.

Having this pointed out isn’t exactly helpful. “You’re an emotional rapist, Fitz,” Penhaligon says.

Profiling isn’t about catching criminals; it’s about organizing data, prioritizing what to focus on when the amount of information is overwhelming. If you know who usually commits a certain crime, you can narrow your search to people whose behavior meets some of those criteria. If you know the geography of the crime, you can make informed inferences about how the killer travels, chooses their victims, interacts with their surroundings, and makes their escape. It’s about probability.

Fitz is not a trained profiler. He’s not interested in catching criminals so much as being right.

He’s also obsessed with probability. Investigating the crimes is another form of betting, of being proven right. “Tell me you did it,” he coaxes a suspect, in the tone you’d use on a lagging longshot.

Cracker is structured somewhat like Colombo, in that we know who did it early on, and we follow both the investigation and the murderer’s attempts to stay ahead of them. It’s in the villains that Cracker excels: no show created more well-rounded antagonists.

There’s the amnesiac prime suspect in a murder on a train: “prove to me I did it and I’ll confess.”

There’s the couple, a former prostitute and the speech-impeded boy she meets at karaoke, who kill out of a mixture of rage at the world and love for each other.

There’s the soldier who comes back from Northern Ireland, where he’s lost friends, to find he has no place in the new “War on Terror.”

Most chilling to me is Albie Kinsella (Robert Carlyle), a white woking class soccer fan present at the human crush at Hillsborough, where the police and the government blamed hooliganism for the deaths of 97 people.

Like the person who retells racist jokes until they eventually stop joking, Albie kills to show he’s not a hooligan, to get revenge for being treated as one, caught in a feedback loop of hate and violence of his own making.

When he’s brought in for questioning, Albie mindlessly repeats the Liverpool FC chants. Fitz, a Celtic fan, answers him in kind:

Albie is a killer who wants to be understood. I’ve been mistreated, I’ve been wronged, my killings are a form of revenge. The Hillsborough crush was ugly, the police and the media blamed people like me, and so I’ve become what you expect me to be. Albie doesn’t want to be stopped, but he’s very willing to explain himself. His crimes are an indictment of society.

Fitz doesn’t care. Albie’s rationale rings hollow. Hillsborough is an excuse. Albie is neither a mindless skinhead or a principled revenger: he’s a weak, mediocre white man threatened by others and dealt a couple of bad blows in life. Not special in the least. Murder makes him feel big.

“You’re looking at me, you’re looking at the future,” Albie says. Sadly true. Albie is every incel with an opinion, every inadequate mass shooter with a manifesto, every person who thinks grief entitles them to someone else’s life.

Solving murder is what makes Fitz feel big. Near the end of run, his long-suffering-but-kind-of-complicit wife Judith asks him to choose family over work. Is spending time with your grandchild really that insufferable? Does your family mean that little to you?

Fitz gets into the police car, giving her the answer she knew was coming, that we secretly want, and which dooms him.

A herd of lemmings following each other off a cliff is a common anthropomorphism for human stupidity. But as Fitz tells a suspect, one day a lemming will fly and prove everybody wrong. Self-destruction as a form of hope—an explanation of human nature as deranged as it is true.