A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
