In our week-long celebration of The Bridge, we’ve already explored the impact of an unconventional heroine, and the challenges of writing one (click here to read that). Now we look at the men in Saga’s life, of which there are three key characters.
Unlike many other crime dramas that feature a female character at its centre, Saga is not defined by her relationships with the men around her. (In fact, it’s the females – her mother and her sister – that have defined her.) Instead, Saga’s relationships with the men we’ve listed below have been symbiotic – she observes, she thinks, she frowns and she learns from them. Or at least tries to.
Her male counterparts also learn something from her.
And that’s the strength of The Bridge – effortless writing and a nuanced, deep characterisation that feels real, featuring characters you can’t help falling in love with.
Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia)
Beloved Martin was a different side of the coin to Saga, and everything she wasn’t. He was garrulous, rambunctious, morally flawed and someone who Saga was both intrigued by, disgusted by and loved by. In those first two series of The Bridge there were plenty of Freudian tropes being played with, but in simple character and narrative terms they were polar opposites, something that cop partnerships have been based on since crime dramas began. But In The Bridge Saga and Martin felt fresh – their friction, and Saga’s incomprehension at some of Martin’s behaviour, was beautifully written and played. But what did Saga learn from Martin? That there could be another type of life, one that involved emotion and interaction; that it was ok to show feelings and form relationships. We cared deeply for these characters because of these opposites, which made Saga shopping Martin at the end of series two even more shocking.
Henrik Sabroe (Thure Lindhardt)
With Martin’s incarceration and Kim Bodnia’s subsequent exit from the show, Hans Rosenfeldt wrote a new male character – another Danish cop, Henrik Sabroe. Unlike Martin, Henrik wasn’t the ying to her yang – he was the yang to her yang, proving that opposites don’t always attract. Henrik – with his own tragedy in his life – is just as messed up as Saga, but differently. He interacts ‘normally’ on a social level, but behind this façade of relative calm, there’s a real loneliness; a vacuum in his core. Just like Saga. It’s in that loneliness where their deep connection lies. It’s telling that, in series three, after she demands sex with him, he’s the first male character we’ve seen in the series so far to actually sleep with her. And we mean just sleep with him.
Hans Petterson (Dag Malmberg)
The man who has always been in the background, the man who has always supported Saga and the man who, ultimately, has gently coaxed her back into the real world. He encouraged, he initiated physical contact (a hug? Saga?!), and he’s displayed paternal love towards her. Above all, he had recognised Saga’s foibles, her unnamed autism-like condition, but also her blinding brilliance. When dear Hans was kidnapped and fatally wounded in series three, Saga was – finally – forced to break down some of those barriers and show emotion. And it was telling that, on the day of her own father’s funeral, she chose instead to sit at Hans’s bedside. Hans was more of a father than her birth father ever was.
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