‘Maigret’ Season 2 Tries to Find “The Hanged Man”
'Maigret' returns for Season 2 as the team tackles the case of "The Hanged Man."
After regrettably missing the first season of the new Masterpiece remake of Maigret, we dove into this season a little concerned about starting with Season 2. This new version of Georges Simenon’s famous French detective changes a lot about the original series, namely Detective Jules Maigret himself, who in the books (and every adaptation up until now) has been a balding, portly, older, bowler-hat-wearing, pipe-smoking fixture of the Paris Police Judiciaire. But while our new Maigret (Ben Wainwright) is young, virile, and sports so much hair he probably couldn’t fit it under a bowler hat if he wanted to, the original material’s deeply episodic nature means you can drop in just about anywhere. (As long as it’s an odd-numbered episode, since it follows the latest trend of a six-episode season made up of three two-part mysteries.)
The opening scene of the Season 2 premiere makes sure we know what we need to. It’s Maigret’s birthday, and his wife, Louise (Stefanie Martini), brings in a cake to help the team throw him a surprise party, and she cheerfully admits it’s because she loves watching him squirm when forced into the spotlight. In short order, we meet the team around him and get an immediate sense of their personalities: the self-assured Lucas (Kerrie Hayes), the snarky Janvier (Shaniqua Okwok), and the plucky Lapointe (Reda Elazouar). With its purpose served, the party is cut short by a bomb threat at the Banque de Vincennes, down the street from the ongoing Champions League match at Parc des Princes; Maigret’s team rolls out, ready to help the bomb squad manage the crowd.
“The crowd” is mostly young people holding up their phones, and LaPointe is sent to wrangle them while Maigret and Janvier get up to speed. The bomb threat demands that the bank “divest from Big Oil,” which means those holding up their phones are the point, and one of them is almost certainly a plant. Janvier spots her first: the woman with the pink backpack, sitting on the bench, pretending not to film while everyone around her is on their feet, making no bones about doing the same.
After following her down to the Seine, Lapointe sees a vendor selling the same backpacks and proposes a switcheroo; when the bomb squad reports that the bank is bomb-free, Maigret agrees. The plan works perfectly until Janvier and Maigret approach to arrest her, whereupon she pulls out a gun and proceeds to shoot herself in the head while looking Maigret dead in the eye.
The backpack holds no bomb, just a suit, probably at least a decade old. Worse, as the team admits to their boss, Prosecutor Mathilde Kernaval (Nathalie Armin), they have nothing to connect her to the bomb threat, other than her sitting on the wrong bench, hugging a bag too tightly. As Moers (James Northcote) notes, the suit is covered in blood, but with no ID and no phone, they have no idea who she is.
Isabelle Jeunet (Sam Bell) arrives, claiming the victim is her estranged daughter, Adeline. They fell out because Isabelle thought she was wasting her education doing environmental protests instead of focusing on her studies. Lucas takes her to the morgue, where she identifies the body, and with that positive ID, sends the name Adeline Jeunet to Maigret.
The series blessedly updated Louise from the bland “Madame Maigret” to a career psychiatric nurse, so when Maigret goes to the hospital to view the body, she miraculously happens to be on break and views it with him. They’re interrupted by a man who barges in, claiming he’s looking for the mortician; he’s apparently Claude Van Damme (CJ Beckford), and claims to sell medical supplies. Louise asks for his card and promises to pass it on; both Maigrets are pretty sure he was really there to see the body and knows who she was.
Maigret’s a bit drunk when Lucas texts him the name; he followed Claude back to his apartment above the family’s bistro, and has been sitting at the bar since. Claude keeps insisting he knows nothing, but his demeanor and the fact that he keeps refilling Maigret’s glass say otherwise, as does the fear in his eyes when Maigret crows that they have identified her. When Van Damme’s wife finally sends their kid out to rescue her poor father, Maigret relents, heads home, and winds up having drunk shower sex with Louise instead of going out to dinner. Happy birthday?
The next morning, Maigret is waylaid by internal affairs, which has launched an investigation into the handling of the suspect, since the result was her shooting herself in broad daylight. Of course, it’s run by our hero’s main nemesis, Cavre (Robert Kazinsky), who couldn’t exude more hatred and jealousy toward Maigret without accidentally imploding. More importantly, it introduces this season’s new main cast member, George Bonfils (Alex Bhat), who is being assigned to Maigret’s team from internal affairs, and will replace Joseph Torrence (Blake Harrison), who exited after Season 1.
With Maigret busy, Lucas runs the daily meeting, which includes an update on Adeline’s employment: a public health clinic in Saint-Denis. She hasn’t shown up for work in days (kinda tough to do when you’re dead), so they hand over her home address. Lucas and Janvier start looking into the people she met at uni, while Lapointe is sent to secure Adeline’s squalid little flat as part of the investigation. In it, he finds a typewriter and torn-up pages that seem to prove that she was the one who sent the bomb threat, as well as a mattress (and a fireplace!) full of euros – £250k, if one counts the remains in the fireplace.
Cavre may think he’s got one over on Maigret by getting him to admit he should have waited to act, but Lapointe isn’t the only one who just tied the victim to the bomb threat; Lucas and Janvier found Adeline went to school with one of the bank’s higher-ups, Genevieve Belloir (Phoebe Sparrow). Belloir is prepared when they arrive, admitting they attended the same university, but insists she doesn’t remember Adeline. She has, however, helpfully rounded up a list of all the other bank employees who were there too, since Lucas will obviously want to talk to them as well.
Lucas’ eyebrows in her hairline tell us how she feels about this. Meanwhile, Janvier pulls the genius move of hitting record on her phone and “losing” it in the chair cushions, so they can record the room for the first few minutes after they leave. When Janvier returns to “find” it and beat a hasty exit, the recording confirms Genevieve immediately called Claude the second they left to tell him she’d fooled the police and they were in the clear. Sure Jan.
With some real leads, Kernaval asks her boss, Director of Police Xavier Guichard (Nathaniel Parker), for judge’s warrants to look into Claude and Genevieve’s bank accounts to see if Adeline was blackmailing them. Guichard, who was once Maigret’s mentor, seems oddly keen to shut the whole case down, but eventually relents and dismisses Maigret. Once they are alone, Guichard all but threatens Kernaval’s career if she keeps supporting her best inspector. She’s taken aback but smoothly ejects him from her office without giving an inch. Either way, this season’s main antagonist seems to have arrived.
The judge refuses to approve the warrants, though it’s unclear whether Guichard’s interference is to blame. Frustrated, Maigret returns to the bar and plays the recording of Genevieve’s phone call to Claude, recognizing him as the weakest link. At the office, Janvier and Lapointe work late, looking for something that might explain the money, the suit, and a photo Adeline kept on her wall of the Church of St. Folien. It’s a good thing they are, because Cavre shows up, hoping to sneak around, but he gets only a single photo of the evidence board before they block him from going any further.
He doesn’t get the answers he wanted, and neither does Maigret from Claude. But Lapointe does find a second death that could tie everything together: a suicide from ten years ago. The deceased, Emil Klein, was also at uni with Adeline and Genevieve; he hung himself from the Church of St. Folien’s door. They report their findings to Maigret as he walks home from the bar, but before he can tell them how to proceed, a car corners him in the alley and runs him over.
I suppose that’s one way to end on a cliffhanger.
Maigret Season 2 continues with new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. on local PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel. PBS Passport members can stream all six episodes from premiere day. As always, check your local listings.
All episodes of Season 1 are available on PBS Passport.
