WARNING: Spoilers — we repeat MASSIVE spoilers ahead!
Watch Season 1 of Mammon first here!
Season 2 of Emmy® Award winning series Mammon is now streaming only on MHz Choice!
If you’ve not seen the entire first season of Mammon… Well, I sincerely doubt there’s anyone who hasn’t, because it’s so addictive that once started you must binge to the end, but, just in case: go watch it. I’ll wait. [Checks watch exactly six hours later] Are you back? Good. Are you exhilarated and, yet, still confused?! I KNOW. This tightly paced but intricately carved sprint was so jam-packed with twists, I am strongly considering filing a workman’s comp claim for whiplash injury. Even now in the glorious era of worldwide Peak TV, rarely does such a wild ride occur that’s so enjoyable from beginning to end. I mean, this thing has it all: childhood trauma, religious metaphor, brilliant women, kids in peril, journalism wars, family drama and next-level financial scheming resulting in the most devastating of all costs. Let’s try to make some sense of it, starting with…
Career Suicide
So, ambitious reporter Peter Verås is ready to break a story wide open on some serious misdoings in one of Norway’s biggest financial companies. There’s an embezzler in their midst, and, yikes… turns out that someone is Peter’s own brother, Daniel. Yes, it’s awkward. The thing is, Peter doesn’t seem all that shocked, as Daniel has long been estranged from the family. Why? Because their dad, a priest (who lives in a vicarage so infused with the Norwegian concept of hygge that it almost caused me to die of jealousy) has always been a hardass to Daniel, treating him like a crook. This opinion seems to be confirmed by what Peter believes is an iron-clad, if anonymous, source, one on which he banks his whole career when he goes to print with the exposé declaring his brother guilty. Just when I thought this was going to be nothing more than an interesting treatise on the European banking collapse, the first twist made my eyes bug out: Daniel, in fact, wasn’t guilty of embezzlement and was cleared by the financial crimes cops. …what? But, apparently like he was guilty of something, because he takes his own life! What?! Come to find, all along, he’s been Peter’s anonymous source, implicating him… self? What?! Peter, with his high-level journalism career now in shambles, takes a job on the sports desk, hooks up with Vibeke, the computer specialist who was looking into Daniel’s money, and resigns himself to watching over Daniel’s son from a distance, as he promised to do. Oh, well, that’s the end of that. WHAT? No…
Fathers and Sons
Not only was Daniel, by anonymously falsely accusing himself, trying to communicate that he was being blackmailed for an entirely different reason – a realization that sets Peter and Vibeke on a personal five-year quest to figure out why Daniel shot himself – he was also, at the same time, sending secret, coded messages to his father through… a painting? Sir, did it need to be this complicated? It’s taking everybody years to decipher this mess! (Kudos to this amazing show: the reveal of the painting’s true provenance was as chilling as anything I’ve seen in a long time.) Their dad had believed all along that the painting depicting Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac in God’s name was a slam on his cold parenting style. In fact, it was a metaphor for Daniel’s own misplaced faith, not in God, but in…
Mammon
Never has the phrase “money is the root of all evil” been so hideously accurate. Like the story of Abraham, the word “mammon” is also found in the Bible, and is generally thought to reference the greedy pursuit of money to the exclusion of everything else. And, wow, did Daniel and his old school chums really buy into the concept! Seems they started an insider trading scheme all the way back in college and kept the whole thing going for decades, each getting filthy rich in the process. As a failsafe measure against whistleblowing, Daniel had instituted a little rule among thieves: to reveal the truth would be to sacrifice your own children, as Abraham had been prepared to do. Nice friends. It’s all fun and games until they have to enforce it when one of the group becomes a threat, which leads to…
Three-time loser
When things get extremely grim for the members of the cabal, they begin taking the only way out available to them and, inconveniently, they all do it in front of Peter. It makes things bad for him with various police forces, as well as his angry former employers who are now competing with the tabloids to cover his increasingly insane life. His old friend and editor, Mathiesen, tries to help, but Peter is continually thwarted by his competitive ex-colleague Inger Marie. Meanwhile, the top dog in Daniel’s horrible “Abraham” club sends Peter down a thousand twisting blind paths while he kidnaps Daniel’s son, Andreas, brutally attacks Andreas’ mother, Eva, and – one twist too far – frames Peter for a terrible crime, causing him to have to go on the run. Even after all of this, after finally putting all the pieces together, gathering up the evidence, escaping explosions and death over and over in a breathless race across the country, Peter only avoids a bitter end when the evil dude is betrayed by the people he hired to do his dirty work. It’s dramatic, but still sophisticated, I loved every second of it, and I can’t wait for Season 2!
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About the author:
Allison Lowe Huff is a freelance writer and editor with an overly concentrated interest in mystery stories from anywhere and everywhere. Follow her on Twitter @lowehuff.
