https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418767995
Television & New Media
2018, Vol. 19(6) 535­–552
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1527476418767995
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Article
The Female Detective,
Neurodiversity, and Felt
Knowledge in Engrenages and
Bron/Broen
Kathleen McHugh1
Abstract
The neurodiverse female detective in transnational crime dramas embodies complex
ways of seeing the gender-based violence these series frequently contain. This
detective both orients and disrupts their narrative and visual fields with what I will
argue is her surveilling yet troubled look. She inhabits the longstanding transnational
tradition of the male defective detective and derives from two recent AngloEuropean
generic staples: female-led crime dramas and neurodiverse protagonists. In
her, gender trouble in the look and its object meet up with the problem of the norm.
Beginning with the example of Engrenages (Spiral, 2005) and then focusing on autism
spectrum detective Saga Norén (Sofia Helin) in Bron/Broen, this article considers how
the generic familiars and innovations vested in this character alter the dynamics of the
gaze, recast the significance of empathy and justice, and enable violence, gender, and
everyday social norms to be unsettled in potentially feminist ways.
Keywords
gender-based violence, TV crime drama, the defective detective, autism, empathy,
neurodiversity, felt knowledge
If signification and representation (what things mean) are no longer the only primary
realm of the political, then bodily processes (how things feel) must be irreducibly central
to any notion of the political.
—Puar (2013, 178)
1University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Kathleen McHugh, Professor and Chair, Department of Film, Television and Digital Media, Professor,
Department of English, UCLA, 203 East Melnitz Hall, Box 951622, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1622, USA.
Email: mchughla@humnet.ucla.edu
767995TVNXXX10.1177/1527476418767995Television & New MediaMcHugh
research-article2018
536	 Television & New Media 19(6)
The troubled female detective in transnational television crime dramas embodies complex
ways of seeing the gender-based violence these series frequently contain. She
both orients and disrupts their narrative and visual fields with what I will argue are her
surveilling yet troubled looks. Empathy and identification frequently shape this detective’s
investigative gaze at crime victims and survivors, sometimes overwhelming her
and/or compelling her to break rules of professional conduct. Or her gaze and behavior
subvert feminine gender codes and/or those of normalcy, which, in turn, draw others’
stares at her. Those female detectives whose “trouble” is neurodiversity inhabit the
longstanding transnational tradition of the male defective detective (Loutensock).
Whether neurotypical (“normal”) or neurodiverse, this figure has recently animated
transnational series and remakes including Bron/Broen (2011–), The Bridge (2013–
2014), The Tunnel (2013–), Dem som Dræber (2011–), Those Who Kill (2014),
Forbrydelsen (2007–2012), The Killing (2011–2014), Engrenages (2005–), The Fall
(2013–), Happy Valley (2014–), Marcella (2016–), and Top of the Lake (2013–).1 This
article will consider detectives whose “trouble” or “defect” draws from and blends two
current Anglo-European generic staples: female-led detective dramas, this special
issue’s topic, and representations of neurodiverse protagonists. The latter have become
a millennial familiar that speaks to viewers globally. Numerous paranoid, bipolar,
autistic, depressed, hysterical, and sociopathic protagonists animate TV genre reboots
in transnationally distributed Anglo-European series.2 Crime dramas that feature
autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or “Aspergerish” investigators make up one such
transnational cluster, with Sherlock Holmes an exemplary figure. These protagonists’
neurodiverse qualities inflect generic hermeneutics concerning the crime (whodunit?)
with diagnostic ones concerning the investigator (what is wrong, odd, exceptional
about him or her?), enabling textual, gendered, and transcultural innovations. At the
same time, the series they lead both use and elicit insights from disability studies and
psychology in their narratives and in paratextual commentary and critical analysis.
I will use the concept of the stare from disability studies, specifically as theorized
by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in her 2009 Staring: How We Look, to consider how
the neurodiverse protagonist affects the visual field of series she leads. Beginning with
the trouble that the neurotypical female detective poses to detection and forensic
knowledge, in her affective responses and as both subject and object of forensic and
erotic gazes, I then consider how the neurodiverse detective both mobilizes and invites
the stare. I argue that the stare troubles these series’ forensic and erotic visual regimes
by incorporating another look that is directed at the detective’s socially non-normative
behavior. Such neurodiverse protagonists include ASD detectives Saga Norén in Bron/
Broen, Sonya Cross in The Bridge, and Elise Wasserman in The Tunnel; sociopathic
Catherine Jensen in Those Who Kill; and Marcella Backland with an unspecified fugue
disorder in Marcella. The look and agency of these women, particularly of those with
ASD, foreground questions of empathy and “felt knowledge” in relation to sexual
violence and justice. These questions are directly related to but not wholly reducible to
gender. Before addressing this figure and what her way of seeing enables, I will situate
her within some of the relevant debates concerning the neurotypical female detective
in serial TV.
McHugh	 537
The Female Detective: Current and Familiar
Scholars have emphasized the problematic conflation of the female detective with the
usually female (or feminized) victim, what Lindsay Steenberg astutely terms forensic
femininity (Creeber 2015, 21; Steenberg 2013, 50, 67–71; Tasker 2002, 48, 53). Female
detective and victim also complement each other. As Barbara Klinger’s (2018, 27)
essay in this special issue outlines, the detective/victim pairing generates a trenchant,
irresolvable feminist paradox that serves as part of this genre’s transnational legibility.
The progressive import of the female detective’s agency is offset by “archaic” representations
of victimized femininity (p. 26). Unlike the female victim, however, the
female detective has been “much discussed,” her gender frequently seen as innovative.3
Interestingly, generic innovation itself is a paradoxical concept. Paolo Russo and
Steenberg assert that new TV serial crime dramas strive to be “both current and familiar”
in a developmental logic wherein the genre “move[s] forward while looking backwards”
(2016, 301). Certainly, claims for innovation rise to the fore and then wane. If,
in 2013, Steenberg hailed the “relatively new figure [of] the female investigator” (49),
three years after that, Deborah Jermyn observed that a female detective, in and of herself,
no longer constituted a “unique selling point” (Jermyn 2017, 264–65).
This detective has repeatedly become new while also invoking familiar themes in a
common generic language inflected most recently by different stages of feminism.
While Janet McCabe (2015, 30), Nete Schmidt (2015, 424), Yvonne Tasker (2002, 25),
and Su Turnbull, (2014, 156–57) ground her genealogy in transnational female authors
(Lois Cayley, Karen Blixen, Sara Paretsky, and Agatha Christie respectively),
Steenberg begins with the innovations of Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs and
Dana Scully in The X-Files (2013, 55). Together with their objects of study, these and
other critics’ arguments dialogically reinvent and renew the meaning of (her) gender
in serial crime drama as it interacts with other generic variables. One important variable
concerns knowledge. In Jermyn’s analysis of Crime Scene Investigation (CSI)
(2000–2015), she notes how the series links the investigators’gender to different kinds
of generic truth and the effects of that linkage on the genre. The show implicitly masculinizes
scientific certainty and feminizes forensic psychology, instinct, and affect by
affiliating the former with Gil Grissom and the latter with Sara Sidle, even if Sidle’s
instincts are correct (Jermyn 2007, 82). CSI’s insistence on evidence-based truth
claims precipitates a “relative disinterest in the criminal mind . . . [and] motive” (2007,
80–81). Jermyn observes that the show’s implicitly gendered preference for science
over psychology deflects “from a more complex or discursive engagement with crime”
(2007, 82). Gendered modes of knowledge affect the genre’s discursive range.
By contrast with CSI, the Anglo-European detectives under consideration here use
serial time’s greater narrative expanse to painstakingly reconstruct the most truthful
and complete story of the victim and (usually) her untimely end. To accomplish this
restoration, the detective assembles and makes sense of forensic evidence and data;
she also, ideally, tries to re-experience and feel the horror and trauma the victim suffered
and to similarly surmise the murderous impulses that drove the killer. Thus, she
models a way of seeing in which her felt knowledge—the physical and emotional
538	 Television & New Media 19(6)
sensations generated by her empathetic identifications with victim and killer—shapes
her mental processes of interpretation, analysis, and judgment. Her TV profession
compels her to identify and empathize across gender positions and profound moral and
ethical divides as both a perpetrator and victim.4
At the same time that the detective’s practice of felt knowledge compels these
forensic and frequently cross-gender identifications, she also anchors the gender
inversions routinely evidenced in these shows. Paired with a sensitive male investigator,
she is rational, withdrawn, nonemotional, and often sexually assertive (Laure
Berthaud in Engrenages, Sarah Lund/Sarah Linden in Forbrydelsen/The Killing,
Stella Gibson in The Fall, Saga Norén/Sonya Cross/Elise Wasserman in Bron/Broen/
The Bridge/The Tunnel, and Marcella Backland in Marcella, though the latter’s reasoned
and reserved persona is shot through with outbursts of rage and violence). For
Jason Mittell, these gender inversions are among a number of highly successful storytelling
innovations, emerging in the 2000s, that make up “complex TV.” Specifically,
TV’s widespread integration of “feminine” appeals (serial melodrama’s focus on emotion,
relationships, and open-ended seriality) into “masculine” genres “has led to more
fluid possibilities of gender identification and . . . challenging of rigid stereotypes of
gendered appeals” (Mittell 2015, 246).
Relevant to my argument are Mittell’s (2015) assertions about gendered characters
and the audience appeal that emerges from these complex serial integrations. As he
argues, “If centering a masculinist genre [crime dramas, espionage thrillers, and science
fiction] on a female figure can disrupt traditional gender norms, the infusion of serial
melodrama into male-centered narrative often calls the dominant definitions of masculinity
into question” (pp. 252–53). The appeal of these complex serials combines “moral
legibility, narrative drive, and emotionally resonant characterization all working to create
a shared ‘felt good’” (p. 245). Mittell references Linda Williams’s work on melodrama
generally and The Wire (2002–2008) particularly in delimiting the appeal of
these shows. It follows that female-led crime serials, with gendered look and subject
matter (gender-based violence), possibly shade complex TV’s appeal of a “shared felt
good” into a form of critical “felt knowledge.” We might see this knowledge as central
to what could be called the complex feminism that arises from these shows.5
Gender inversions in serial crime dramas disrupt traditional gender norms, especially
welcome in light of the gender-based violence at their core. At the same time,
these gender inversions are frequently triangulated with male trauma, whether sustained
by the perpetrator (Jens Hansen in Bron/Broen, Paul Spector in The Fall), investigator
(Pierre Clement in Engrenages, Stephen Holder in The Killing, Martin Rohde
in Bron/Broen), or relative or lover of the victim (Benoit Faye in Engrenages, Stan
Larsen in Forbrydelsen/The Killing). Along with female victim and detective, all suffer
trauma but do so in distinct registers. Trauma is motive for the perpetrator, suffering
and demise for the victim, and source of knowledge (of their trauma through her
own) for the detective. Insofar as trauma becomes, through the focalization of the
detective, an overarching source of forensic knowledge as well as of emotional resonance
and moral legibility, it insinuates the detective’s felt knowledge into the “felt
good” that Mittell identifies. McCabe (2015, 38) speaks to the dynamic I am
McHugh	 539
attempting to address when she references the feelings of injustice and inequality these
shows elicit that cannot be apprehended (figuratively or literally) by “emancipatory
rhetoric” and the “rule of law.” These female detectives and their fraught felt knowledge
precipitate yet go beyond the discursive engagement with gender-based violence
that Jermyn references.6 Thus, in the way this detective detects, in the way she is compelled
to look and feel, gender trouble meets sexual trauma meets the pointedly unrealizable
(feminist) fantasy of reparative justice.
While the female detective currently orients innovations specific to the genre (gender
inversions) and to contemporary televisual storytelling writ large (infusion of
serial melodrama into more resolution-based “masculine” genres), her troubled looking,
especially in the case of neurodiverse detectives, fits the longstanding tradition of
the dysfunctional or defective detective, which stretches back to odd, but brilliant
eccentrics C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes (Turnbull 2014, 183; Defective
Detective n.d.).7 This tradition includes asocial, alcoholic and workaholic, and physically
disabled detectives and those who are neurodiverse.8 Psychologists and fans
have repeatedly diagnosed Sherlock Holmes, in his many iterations, with autism
(Loftis 2014, 1), while Benedict Cumberbatch identifies his version of this character
in Sherlock (2010–) as “a high functioning sociopath” (Woods 2014, 3). Various TV
series identify detectives of both genders as neurodiverse, as OCD (obsessive compulsive
disorder) or bipolar or “on the spectrum”: Monk in Monk (2002–2009), Carrie in
Homeland (2011–), and Dr. Temperance Brennan in Bones (2005–2017) respectively.
These shows’ characters exhibit what the neurodiverse community refers to as the
savant stereotype (Dale 2013, 1; Woods 2014, 3); that is, their protagonist’s disorder
produces their genius.
By contrast, and setting her neurodiverse status aside for the moment, the AngloEuropean
female detective’s dysfunctions tend to be gendered. They often involve
past violent sexual trauma that aligns her with the crime victim, fosters her forensic
expertise, and “suggest[s] that professional women are always already damaged in
some fundamental way” (Steenberg 2013, 19). Yet rather than her experience being
personalized and individuated as in the U.S. examples Steenberg analyzes, in the
Anglo-European shows considered here, the victim and detective’s shared experience
are coupled with a sustained focus on social institutions (police, judiciary, medical
establishment, social services) and their clientele (the victims, the homeless, lost girls,
sex workers).9 Taken together, they underscore how pervasive gendered violence is.
As sexual and familial trauma often constitutes the detective’s backstory, this story
also conveys gendered violence’s chronic character and after effects. Frequently, the
detective’s hermeneutic mysteries extend beyond those of the victim across multiple
seasons (Forbrydelsen/The Killing, The Fall, and Bron/Broen), and this backstory
shapes her (and our) ways of seeing and feeling the serial narrative as it unfolds. These
shows present gender-based violence as generic, as a norm. Through the lens of the
neurodiverse female detective, a newly current and yet familiar figure, they also mobilize
felt knowledge, but with a twist. If customarily, such knowledge blends empathy
with reason, the ASD detective, with a compromised relationship to empathy, presents
a special case that nevertheless reaches back to the genre’s literary origins.
540	 Television & New Media 19(6)
The Gaze and the Stare: Ways of Seeing from Engrenages
to Bron/Broen
The neurodiverse female detective redirects generic conventions of character eccentricity
and defect to gendered questions of the norm. What then is the nature of the
norm in crime drama? If autism is a disorder characterized by a profound allegiance to
order and system, the ASD detective of either gender hyperbolizes a central generic
trope: faith in, the need for, and the simultaneous othering of detectives who reason
without affect, tact, or requisite social skills. As such qualities accord with neurotypical
or normal masculinity, ASD male detectives are generically normalized by their
gender. From Dupin and Sherlock forward, they underscore the neurotypical female
detective’s novelty or “trouble”—she feels, she interacts, she has empathy. The female
ASD detective confounds this gendered system in complex ways that I will discuss.
For the moment, it is important to note that crime drama’s neurodiverse protagonists
are part of a widespread academic and cultural zeitgeist. As neuropsychology and
neuroscience have grown increasingly prominent, more traditional psychodynamic
approaches have migrated from psychology to English classrooms, from clinics to
critical theory, and, most recently, from textbooks to film and television genres wherein
neurodiverse characterizations provide (clinical) nuance and complexity to gender
binaries and melodramatic moral certainties. These shows thereby craft a substantive
dialogue, staged in visual narrative, between diagnostic and generic typologies.
In this section, I will read this dialogue through visual analytics provided by both
discursive parties to it: the gaze from media studies and the stare from disability studies.
Specifically, I use Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s (2009) theorization of the stare
to read the interplay these series stage among forensic, erotic, and socially normativebased
forms of looking. Garland-Thomson specifically distinguishes the stare from the
media studies gaze: “we gaze at what we desire, but we stare at what astonishes us” (p.
13). While the gaze is theorized as an “oppressive act of disciplinary looking that subordinates
its victim,” the stare is an intense visual exchange grounded in the social and
in appearance (9–10). She writes,
Staring is an ocular response to what we don’t expect to see . . . an urgent eye jerk of
intense interest. We stare when ordinary seeing fails, when we want to know more. So
staring is an interrogative gesture that asks what is going on and demands the story.
(Garland-Thomson 2009, 3, emphasis added)10
Staring is interactive, social, and seeks knowledge (pp. 13–15). It “establishes a social
relationship between the starer and the staree . . . through which we act out who we
imagine ourselves and others to be” (p. 14) The starer often reflexively presumes a
normality, an integrity, a state of nonexceptionalism that the staree does not possess.
Staring is also “a conduit to knowledge,” about making the unknown known, “and the
incomprehensible legible” (p. 15). In its disciplined, goal-driven form, staring generates
knowledge through a specific practice: “staring as information collection requires
concentrated, focused, and prolonged looking” (p. 20).
McHugh	 541
We stare at the dead, the anomalous, the differently abled, at what is out of place or
unpredictable. In this and in its knowledge-seeking sense, the stare certainly pertains
within the visual coordinates of the serial crime drama, most obviously as the look of
witnesses and detectives at the (often) dead victim. While the witness stares involuntarily—horrified,
traumatized, shocked—the stare of the investigator blends that shock
with forensic attention and empathy. In fact, the detectives’ capacity to combine these
two stares (involuntary/traumatized, and focused) frequently figures in their characterization
and their narrative angst. Whereas the erotic gaze objectifies, sexualizes, and
genders, the stare generates social and forensic meanings, interrogating the shocking,
the strange, and the traumatic. In both its forensic and social forms, staring poses queries
and establishes exchanges among distinct and diverse ways of seeing.
Two series, Engrenages and Bron/Broen, demonstrate different uses of the gaze and
the stare in their opening seasons. While the latter show features a neurodiverse female
detective, the former does not. Engrenages has foundational significance to AngloEuropean
crime dramas and establishes a representational baseline with which to contrast
how neurodiversity and the stare work in Bron/Broen. Considering this series,
McCabe (2012, 104) observes, “Before The Killing, there was the Swedish Wallander
[2005–10]—but the European crime wave started with Spiral [Engrenages].”11
Furthermore, she distinguishes this show from its U.S. antecedents, contrasting their
easy closure and “strong moral compass” with Engrenage’s hard, hyper-real look at
French criminal justice—the police, judiciary, the public—“and the social aspects of
those relations” (p. 101). Her distinctions echo Jermyn’s that the French show exhibits
a complex discursive engagement with crime not seen in forensic series such as CSI.
Engrenages’s insistent gender inversions include a striking deployment of the gaze
and the stare in relation to male trauma. The first season startlingly enacts the attempted
restitution of a female body from the object of a forensic and horrified stare to that of
the erotic male gaze. Tellingly, this restitution is coded as a male trauma, suffered by
Prosecutor Pierre Clement. The pilot opens on the series’ gateway body (Klinger
2018)—a mutilated yet mannequin-shapely white female corpse in a dumpster. Her
head and face are swathed in bloodied cloth; although her gender, race, youth, and the
brutal nature of her demise are evident, she cannot initially be identified or individuated.
At the crime scene, Clement stares down at the corpse; his expressionless face, à
la Kuleshov, “expresses” what another detective leaning over the body explicitly articulates:
“horrific.”
Clement then meets Captain Laure Berthaud, the head of the investigative team,
who, while working on the crime scene, has also cast a desiring gaze at him. Clement,
oblivious, announces his forensic hypothesis to her, one subsequently repeated almost
verbatim by several male officials involved in the case: pathologist, judge, and detective.
Each assert that the ferocity wreaked on the faceless corpse means, “she must
have been beautiful.” Like Freud’s contrary interpretation of the Wolfman’s dream
(that the dream wolves’ stillness must mean “the most furious motion” [Freud
1918/1989, 409]), Clement and his fellows reason from what they can see, what compels
their stares—the ferocious defacement and mutilation of the corpse—to what they
cannot, her face, her beauty. They reason not only that contrary as imperative (“she
542	 Television & New Media 19(6)
must have been beautiful”) but also that imperative—aesthetic/erotic female beauty—
as cause (thus, the ferocity). Whereas for the male legal team, the victim’s beauty, and
by inference, their foreclosed erotic gaze at her, is of the utmost significance, Laure
Berthaud concerns herself with more straightforward forensics—who is the victim,
where was she killed, who did it? Over the course of season 1, she identifies the victim,
finds a photograph that indeed depicts a beautiful woman, and finally discovers
the crime’s perpetrators. Insistent gender inversions structure season 1, wherein
Berthaud reasons, commands, and synthesizes evidence (also bedding Clement), while
her male colleagues (lead investigator, prosecutor, and judge) make repeated and significant
mistakes, frequently based on their own affective and erotic relationships.12
At season’s close, a sequence that mirrors the opening renders Clement back at the
crime scene looking down at the dumpster, now filled with tires (S1 E8). He initially
imagines the murdered body, and then the woman, made whole, clad in a beautiful red
dress, lounging before him on the tires, eyes closed, as if on a fashion shoot. He then
envisions her murder through split second flashbacks with the sound of blows appointing
each cut. We see him wince. Several things are notable here. Clement’s (and the
series’) look is staged, momentarily, as the conventional erotic gaze; this male gaze
images/imagines a redress (literally and figuratively) of the dead woman, restoring her
face, her beauty, and her red dress. The vision of her beauty then precipitates the vision
of her death. Significantly, the scene depicts the injury as now inflicted on Clement,
specifically on his gaze—he visibly flinches as he/the series visualizes the blunt force
annihilation done to the object of their erotic gazes. We literally see static in the visual
image as we hear the thud of bodily blows. Thus, the damage and defacement done to
erotic beauty is visually and audibly represented as trauma inflicted on the male gaze
(Figure 1).
Several feminist scholars have responded to the troubling erotics of male investigators’
visual exploration of female corpses.13 By contrast, in series where the chief
detective is female, this stare is often framed as empathetic and implicitly interactive
rather than erotic (Tasker 2002, 48). However, where the female detective is neurodiverse,
the stare acquires added critical and possibly political functions in the sense
Jasbir Puar asserts in the epigraph above. These protagonists and their behavior often
invite stares rather than gazes, perplexity rather than desire. At the same time, they
themselves mobilize the stare as central agents within visual fields organized by their
forensic look. The profoundly gendered dynamics of visual knowing in series with
neurodiverse female protagonists alter those evidenced in shows where the neurodiverse
character is male (Sherlock) or where the detectives’ maverick quality is not
coded, explicitly or implicitly, as diagnosable.14 For the remainder of this essay, I
focus on ASD detective Saga Noren in Bron/Broen because her neurodiverse characterization
works to decouple empathy, fundamental to forensic felt knowledge, from
her gender.
Bron/Broen’s distinctive use of the gaze and the stare commences in the pilot’s
opening sequence (S1 E1). A woman’s body, dressed in business attire, is found bisecting
the Oresund Bridge connecting Copenhagen, Denmark with Malmo, Sweden. The
body evidences no visible signs of injury: no wounds, blood, or sexual assault. Danish
McHugh	 543
detective Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) stands over the body and gazes at Saga Noren,
his Swedish counterpart, as she arrives on scene. Martin’s look expresses frank sexual
interest and friendliness, while Saga only has eyes for the murder victim; she avoids
making eye contact with Martin, save to quickly glance at him when she officially
introduces herself. Otherwise, she stares, either blankly into space or attentively at the
body with which she is visually compared by a quick cutaway shot (both are blond and
attractive) (Figure 2).
Saga and Martin become binational coinvestigators of an apparently socially conscious
serial killer, nicknamed the “truth terrorist,” traumatizing both cities that abut
the bridge. The killer’s crimes highlight social issues: unequal treatment before the
Figure 1.  The redress of the male gaze.
Figure 2.  Saga’s stare.
544	 Television & New Media 19(6)
law, homelessness, funding cuts to mental health clinics, and child labor infractions by
multinational corporations. The gateway body on the bridge is actually two bodies, cut
in half and pieced together. The upper half belongs to instantly recognizable Swedish
politician, Kerstin Ekwell, killed days before the body was found. The lower half
belongs to Danish prostitute, Monique Brammer, killed a year earlier, her death left
uninvestigated until attributed to someone prominent and wealthy. If the Engrenages
gateway body is a generic female victim (young, white, beautiful, and naked), the
Bron/Broen body is an elaborate puzzle, a social statement, representing a continuum
of women who are treated unequally before the law. Staged as an installation piece (the
lights of the bridge go off and then turn on again, as in theater), the body “incorporates”
features of the site, the splice of the body aligned exactly with the national
border between Sweden and Denmark.
As with the corpse to which she is visually compared, Saga is an enigma. While she
appears to be a conventional postfeminist protagonist, dressed in leather pants and
driving a Porsche, her manner disconcerts. She routinely defies polite, socially normative
(and implicitly gendered) behavioral norms. Martin asks her if she has children.
She responds, “Why would I want them?” He says he has never heard anyone ask that
question before, and she says, “Many should have asked” (S1 E1).15 Saga never smiles
and stares frequently, at bodies, evidence, forensic information, and at witnesses and
suspects when she questions them. Otherwise, she systematically avoids eye contact.
For her, looking is professional, sometimes sexual, but not interpersonal or emotional.
The show gives multiple examples of her inability to gauge or respond to the feelings
of those on whom she fixes her stare. At the same time, she unerringly follows official,
procedural, and ethical rules. At the initial crime scene, she refuses to let an ambulance
pass through carrying Charlotte Soringer’s (Ellen Hillingso) husband because his life
is not in immediate danger.
Martin and others regularly stare at Saga, precisely for interpersonal and emotional
reasons. Aghast to amused, they stare, discreetly, because she does not adhere to social
conventions related to femininity, empathy, discretion, or tact. Their stares at Saga
make narratively and thematically salient the tacit rules of empathetic social interaction
that her ASD prevents her from following. In a male detective, such behavior
would be seen as masculine. Saga’s difference introduces drama and mystery to what
might otherwise be rote social interactions and small talk in the workplace and on the
street. Through these social stares, Bron/Broen complicates the queasy and unsettling
blend of forensic stares and male erotic gaze witnessed in Engrenages. At the same
time, men take Saga as an object of the erotic gaze (Martin, Daniel, August, Jakob,
Henrik). She, however, is oblivious to their looks and to her appearance being connected
to her sexuality. While studying forensic journals and pathology reports, she
feels randy, sticks her hand down her pants, and then goes to a bar to pick up a guy (S1
E2). (She does so by making eye contact and giving him the ghost of a smile.) Saga’s
lack of feminine self-consciousness, her inability to, in John Berger’s (1972, 47) terms,
watch herself being watched, effectively undoes the presumptions of the male gaze.
After all night work sessions, Saga routinely changes her shirt publicly in the office.
When she does so in front of Martin, he stares at her, his face registering increasing
McHugh	 545
discomfort and embarrassment. He looks around to see if anyone else is looking (S1
E1). Saga is all business. Subsequent to this scene, Martin’s interest in Saga shifts to a
kind of social forensics. He aligns with Saga’s Swedish team who bond with him over
their stares at her, recognizing their shared difference from her distance, impersonal
demeanor, and absolute allegiance to rules.
Autism, Empathy, and Ethics
Saga fulfills the narrative function of many female detectives, which is both to investigate
the crime, while being investigated and visually scrutinized by coworkers,
authorities, and the narrative itself, along the same lines as the female homicide victim
(Steenberg 2013, 50). Although there is a physical resemblance between Saga and the
gateway body, several factors in Bron/Broen nuance or confound the conventional
generic conflation between female victim and investigator. These include the composite
character of the corpse, the conflation of Saga, the corpse and several other female
characters, and finally, the paradoxical similarities between Saga and the killer.
The composite corpse is simultaneously middle-aged and young, Swedish and
Danish, established and precarious, visible and invisible, and engaged in high and low
public labor and roles (politics and sex work). Rather than being a singular victim of
gender-based violence, the body on the bridge presents a range of women vulnerable
to its effects. As social composite, this body forecloses the narrative pathos generated
by the victim’s family and friends. Instead the composite corpse encompasses a social,
cultural, and forensic spectrum of crime and loss, all decidedly incommensurate. Thus,
rather than signifying within the hermeneutics of the profile and singular victim, the
composite embodies social hierarchy: upper and lower, who can be seen and not seen,
who is valued and who is not.
Just as the composite corpse registers a social spectrum of male motives for and
female vulnerabilities to gender-based violence, the narrative presents similarly
socially diverse blonde women, all physical doubles for Saga, who experience various
kinds of gendered violence: Mette, Martin’s wife, suffers unspeakable harm because
of her husband’s lying and cheating; Sonja, Stefan’s client, is a young mother battered
by her boyfriend; and Veronika, Stefan’s “lost girl” sister, is homeless, abused, neurodiverse,
and ultimately a victim of the serial killer’s poison attack.16 These visual and
narrative resonances infuse the program with a pervasive sense of gendered precarity,
experienced by (white blond) women across borders and social classes, and of different
levels of expertise, accomplishment, and resources. At the same time, the series
avoids any overarching gendered morality. Saga’s sister, Jennifer, and troubled teenager
Anja (Fanny Ketter) both have fatally abusive mothers, and August (Emil Birk
Hartmann) loses his life because his father betrays a former business partner.
Within this discursively complex mise-en-scene, Saga’s ASD provides for a key
reversal. As the series progresses, her affectless, un-self-conscious attention toward
others renders her a reflexively astute analyst of what is represented as “normal” gender
behavior. She does not understand behavior guided by subtle niceties and discretion,
and is seemingly compelled to ask very pointed questions. After hearing about
546	 Television & New Media 19(6)
Martin’s dalliance with Charlotte, the industrialist’s widow, Saga logically concludes,
“You don’t believe in monogamy.” Martin responds, “I do.” “Then why do you cheat?”
she asks (S1 E7). When Martin chides her for asking him a telling question in front of
his wife, Saga says, “It is not a problem that you cheat, but that Mette found out” (S1
E7). Through Saga, Bron/Broen reveals such polite behavior as often empty, misleading
performance, at best, and blatantly dishonest at worst. If at the outset, we see Saga
through Martin, her ASD rendering her guilty of numerous social misdemeanors, in
the end, we see Martin through her affectless, asocial, and scrupulously honest perspective.
We learn that his warmth, empathy, and maverick sensibility have led him to
sexual dalliances and deceptions that have instigated the serial killer and, ultimately, a
devastating loss to his family. Early on, Martin asks Saga, “Are there any rules you
don’t follow?” She parries, “What [rules] should we ignore if people are helpful to
us?” (S1 E5).
These key questions—about the relationship between rules and social niceties—
deflect Saga and Martin’s inversely gendered affects and performance to questions
concerning affect and ethics. Martin empathizes and continually does emotional outreach
that, with women, often becomes flirtatious and sexual. The rules Martin consistently
ignores have to do with truth and communication. He lies constantly to prevent
conflict, to protect himself, to be diplomatic. By contrast, Saga never lies; she does not
possess the affective framework, the concern for others’feelings that would inhibit her
expression of the truth as she sees it. As everyone’s reactions to her bald-faced truths
imply, people expect her to “lie” or to at least edit the truth with empathy for the
hearer/listener. She never does.
As an inveterate truth-teller, Saga is subtly aligned with Jens, the serial killer and
“truth terrorist.” If her honesty prompts her disregard for other people’s feelings, his
“truths” are the social problems that his serial killings expose. Her truth telling exists on
a continuum with Jens’s performative truth-acts (a ruse for his real, personal motivations
for the killings) and Martin’s lies and cheating. Unlike Martin who is presented as
neurotypical, both Saga and Jens are neurodiverse—she with ASD and he as a psychopath.
These disorders distinguish them from Martin in a very particular way. Both ASD
and psychopathy notably manifest in compromised abilities to empathize. Empathy, an
interpersonal affect, encompasses two distinct functions: first, an ability to recognize
what someone else is feeling, and second, an ability to have an appropriate affective
response to those feelings (Baron-Cohen 2011, 12). Psychopaths and people with ASD
differ in their empathetic capacities based on these two functional axes: accurate recognition
of others’feelings (cognitive function) and appropriate response to those feelings
(affective function). While psychopaths have no cognitive impairment—they are often
astute readers of others’ feelings—their affective or subjective response is inappropriate,
self-serving, or nonexistent. They see others as objects to do with as they please and
do not care what they feel. People on the autism spectrum, by contrast, have compromised
cognitive function; they cannot read or recognize others’ feelings (Baron-Cohen
2011, 45–61, 67–86). However, their affective responses to others’ feelings, once they
understand what they are, are highly functional (Baron-Cohen 2011, 73). They do care
and can care deeply (Baron-Cohen 2011, 45–61, 67–86).
McHugh	 547
That caring, interestingly enough, derives at least in part from another feature of
ASD. Along with her compromised ability to empathize, Saga’s ASD results in her
need and ability to “systematize to an extraordinary degree” (Baron-Cohen 2011, 74).
This manner of processing information leads her and others with ASD not to be
immoral, like psychopaths, but often super-moral. People with ASD are tuned to recognize
patterns, to look for and find security in rules. Social and emotional interactions
make them uncomfortable because they do not seem to have rules, to be based on reliable
and verifiable truth (Baron-Cohen 2011, 74). Following logical rules, by contrast,
“provides . . . direct access to the truth, since our predictions are confirmed as true or
false” (Baron-Cohen 2011, 77). ASD individuals who have intact affective empathy
and systematizing “have a strong desire to live by the rules and expect others to do the
same, for reasons of fairness” (Baron-Cohen 2011, 87, emphasis in original).
While Saga has trouble anticipating, reading, and understanding the social cues
given off by others, when she is prompted or logically discerns someone’s feelings,
she responds appropriately. Because she has carefully studied the serial killer and his
patterns, she knows and cares about how much danger Anja and later, August, are in.
She logically ponders why the serial killer did not kill Martin when he had the chance
and comprehends before anyone that August, not Mette, is the last and most important
of the serial killer’s targets. Along the way, she has also studied and internalized the
rules that Martin and Hans have given her: praise your staff, share personal information,
and, above all, protect your partner. As might be expected, these rules come into
conflict with Saga’s inability to lie and to feel empathy.
Fittingly, the last two episodes realize this conflict in moments of Saga touching
and/or looking directly at other characters. When Martin learns that Jens has Mette and
his children, he gasps in panic. Without looking at him, Saga reaches over and puts her
gloved hand over his and squeezes it (S1 E9). Later, at the hospital, being treated for
the serious gunshot wound Jens inflicted on her, Saga begins to dress and tries to leave.
A nurse tells her she is in no condition to go. She insists, and the nurse has Saga
squeeze her fingers, which she can hardly do. Saga asks to try again and musters her
strength to do so, while looking steadily into the nurse’s eyes and telling her she is ok
(S1 E10). We see Saga lie in this exchange, effectively distracting the nurse from perceiving
her weak grip by making direct eye contact and holding her gaze; she does so
in the interest of protecting her partner. In the penultimate scene, Martin, Jens, and
Saga face off in an exchange of looks where the importance of affect, rules, and truth
all come to a head under the bridge where the initial composite corpse was discovered
(S1 E10).
Saga, Martin, and Jens come to this confrontation, each located on bisecting continua
or spectrums related to affect (empathy or the lack of it), truth (a commitment to
honesty and the facts, no matter the consequences for oneself or others or the lack of
it), ethics (conformance to civil, rule-based behaviors or their lack), and neurodiversity
or the lack of it. Jens uses his capacity for cognitive empathy to manipulate August
and seduce Mette. His “honesty” as the truth terrorist is, like his empathy, completely
instrumental. Although highly systematic in his pursuit of revenge, he has no ethics,
follows no rules, and has no feelings for others. Although more ethical than Jens,
548	 Television & New Media 19(6)
Martin, like many maverick detectives, breaks rules to effectively fight crime and
solve cases. His commitment to ethics can be instrumental, as, in his view, the ends
can justify the means. Martin is highly empathetic, emotional, intuitive, and has an
inchoate “felt knowledge” about the masked killer. Yet his own complicity and lack of
honesty prevent him from grasping his feelings’ forensic import—that the killer is his
former partner and best friend. On these continua, Saga’s superior ethics derive from
a “felt knowledge” where her ASD proclivity for systems and rules fosters her capacity
for affective empathy. Relatedly, her compromised ability to empathize actually
guarantees her honesty because her expressions of truth are not affected by others’
feelings.
In the final confrontation with Jens and Martin, Saga tries to lie (about August’s
death) to stop Martin from breaking the rules (shooting Jens) in a fit of grief and rage.
She and Martin have their guns drawn, but before any gun is fired, they exchange a
series of direct, prolonged looks at each other. Martin demands to know if August is
dead, and Saga attempts to defer the question, telling him they found him. Jens baits
him, saying repeatedly that Saga is lying. Martin asks her repeatedly, and finally, she
looks directly at him, weeping, and shakes her head no. He turns to shoot Jens as Saga
shoots him, to stop him from killing Jens.
Notably, through the comparative and interactional dynamics among these three
characters, season 1 of Bron/Broen presents a complex meditation on truth, ethics, and
empathy that is inflected but not determined by gender or gender inversions. Saga’s
character, though never overtly diagnosed, hews closely to the diagnostic criteria for
ASD, and the series creators make use of these qualities in a rigorous and nuanced
consideration of empathy and its relationship to justice and ethics.17 While this series
follows on other Anglo-European predecessors by eschewing “easy closure” and
strong moral binaries, Saga’s neurodiversity also enables affect or its lack to be disengaged
from a gender binary, inverted or otherwise. McCabe writes of Saga, “the
Asperger’s . . . hints at moving beyond the politics of gender . . . and the ambiguity of
difference” such that Saga can “adhere without sentiment to those universal standards
of human rights and democratic values” (McCabe 2015, 41). Season 1’s plot, together
with Saga’s character arc, displaces the binary of gender difference, invited by Saga
and Martin’s pairing, with the question of the norm. The stares at and by Saga foreground
this question, especially as it encompasses a range of social relations related to
gender but not wholly vested in it. At the same time, throughout, Bron/Broen insists
not on difference or binaries but on spectrums or continua of social norms, privilege,
and threat, of characters and qualities, of more or less destructive expressions of sexuality,
desire, affect, honesty, and ethics.
If the question of feminism, crucial to these series’ transnational lingua franca,
seems both imperative and impossible to pose in the case of the female detective,
Saga’s ASD provides a possible innovation or intervention. Through the gateway
body, truth terrorist plot, and most importantly, Saga’s character, Bron/Broen implicitly
challenges “what things mean” (gender, gender-based violence) precisely by
upending and unsettling generic notions of “how things feel” and for whom. Feminist
criticism of these series, including Bron/Broen, is noticeably marked by (a range of)
McHugh	 549
feelings or felt knowledge. Jermyn (2017, 273) explicitly theorizes and performs such
knowledge, reflecting on her and other feminist critics’ “felt or embodied response” to
The Fall. She articulates a critical approach “in which the cerebral and the ‘physical’
are not at odds but come together, being prompted by a political sensibility (an investment
in feminism) while felt and expressed in an embodied way” (p. 273). Writing
about female detectives in Forbrydelsen and Bron/Broen, McCabe finds, in the “feel”
or “feeling” these heroines present or elicit, an utterance of “the new” (p. 31). She
writes that they “come to represent what has rarely been seen before” and “promise
‘the coming age of a different law’for representing the female self differently” (p. 31).
That different law is related to feelings of injustice (p. 38). In maintaining but displacing
gender from what it means to how it feels, from a neurotypical to a neurodiverse
perspective, Bron/Broen suggests that what we take for normal can sometimes be the
most dangerous of all.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
 1.	 Lindsay Steenberg notes that in the forensic subgenre, female investigators tend to be
“deeply troubled” because many have been “violently victimized.” While that characterization
holds true for the detectives discussed here, some are also neurodiverse, which
complicates the nature of their troubles (Steenberg 2013, 63).
  2.	 The examples are far too numerous to list here, and they cover all genres. Detectives and
investigators tend to suffer bipolar disorder (Claire Danes, Homeland) or are autistic or
sociopaths or drug addicts. Notably, the latter three defects have all been attributed to
Sherlock Holmes in his many print and screen manifestations. Willa Paskin (2013) writes
that Temperance Brennen has “an ‘adorable’ or ‘funny’ version of Asperger’s” as opposed
to Saga Norén’s “super-serious” portrayal.
  3.	 Examples would include chapters or articles in Alberti (2017, 2, 15–17), Jermyn (2017,
259-276), McCabe (2015, 29–43), Schmidt (2015, 423–56), Steenberg (2013, 50–98), and
Turnbull (2014, 153–85).
  4.	 Steenberg mentions empathy but focuses on “female forensic intuition”—she sees this
as related to women’s superior moral authority in American culture, an authority that
derives from the experiences of motherhood and victimhood (Steenberg 2013, 64).
McCabe discusses the “instinctive empathy” that Lund shares with the female victim (p.
30) that she distinguishes from the “feel” Lund has for the crime scene, a feel that is not
instinctive but based on “hard investigative work” and “an uncompromising ability to
look” (p. 40). Interestingly, Will Graham from the Hannibal Lecter novels, film, and TV
show presents the most sustained exploration of an investigator who suffers and is damaged
by his extraordinary and neurodiverse ability to empathize viscerally with serial
killers.
550	 Television & New Media 19(6)
  5.	 As the articles in this special issue attest, the feminism these shows generate is complex; it
derives not only from their poetics (use of characters, sound, image, technology, mobilization
of affect) but also from their generic, contextual, and cultural references and travel.
This term references Mittell’s “complex TV” but describes a political poetics that is resolutely
transnational.
  6.	 Steenberg’s (2013) notion of the female investigator’s moral authority “frequently narrativised
as a criminalistically informed women’s intuition” informs this argument (p. 57).
  7.	 Loutensock (2017).
 8.	 Ironside, NBC, 1967–1975 featured the lead detective, played by Raymond Burr, in a
wheelchair.
  9.	 Barry Forshaw (2013) links Nordic Noir’s “unsparing examination of society” on Swedish
authors’ leaning to the left and their move away from what they saw as the prose genre’s
bourgeois “accoutrements” in the 1960s (p. 14). Eva Novrup Redvall (2013) examines the
multiple historical, institutional, and cultural forces that underwrite what she refers to as
“double storytelling”: that Nordic media’s public service obligation results in shows that
have a “good story” that is combined with “ethical and social connotations” (p. 68).
10.	 Garland Thomson’s phrasing here recalls Mulvey’s when she writes of the voyeuristic gaze
and its relation to narrative: “Sadism demands a story.”
11.	 The “first French language drama ever picked up by the BBC,” it did better in foreign territories
than its own domestic market, becoming “the biggest French TV series export ever”
(by 2012) (McCabe 2012, 102, 104).
12.	 Her lead investigator snorts cocaine and misses a key clue on a stakeout; Prosecutor
Clement’s best friend is the dead woman’s boyfriend, which he learns only belatedly after
inappropriately sharing investigative information, and the presiding judge loses the victim’s
diary, a key piece of evidence.
13.	 For feminist scholarship, see Steenberg (2013, 10; 76–80).
14.	In Sherlock, the dynamic with Watson is homosocial, and his ASD directed to his genius.
In Elementary, Sherlock is a deductive genius as well.
15.	 An ironically prescient question given that Martin will be responsible, by proxy, for his
son’s death. Saga speaks from her own experience growing up in an abusive household
with a mother who had Munchhausen by proxy.
16.	 The narrative pointedly invites the comparison between Saga and Veronika, as both are
neurodiverse, came from abusive homes, sport blank stares, and have no self-consciousness
about baring their chests in public.
17.	 Series creator Hans Rosenfeldt, who also created Marcella, imagined Martin as a warm,
family man to distinguish him from the dysfunctional “middle-aged white detectives
in Sweden” (McKay 2014, 2; Immediate Media Company, 2016). While he imagined
Saga’s dissociated interactional style as complement and gender inversion to Martin,
director Charlotte Sieling and actor Sofia Helin saw Saga not as a gendered anomaly
but as a neurological one—as being on the autism spectrum (Khaleeli 2012, 3; McKay
2014, 2).
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Author Biography
Kathleen McHugh, Chair of UCLA Film, Television and Digital Media, is the author of Jane
Campion, and American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama. She
has published on transnational media and film feminisms, global melodrama, experimental
autobiography, and celebrity in Signs, Camera Obscura, Cultural Studies, Jump Cut, Screen,
South Atlantic Quarterly, and Velvet Light Trap. She is currently researching the role of neurodiverse
protagonists in contemporary genres.