An heated debate lately went viral on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
