I Fell In Love With ‘The Tourist’

Season 2 of the BBC’s The Tourist is a wild ride about identity, love and despair. A great cast, Spaghetti Western music, beautiful scenery and tell the mostly-comic story of “the man” (Jamie Dornan) an Irishman who wakes up with total amnesia, a tourist in his own life. He’s barely out of hospital before murderous thugs start chasing him, and he finds himself falling in love with angelic rookie police officer Helen Chambers. In season 2, Helen and the man go to Ireland to see what they can find out about his identity, his past, and, if Helen likes what she finds, their possible future together.

The show gives Danielle McDonald, as Helen, second billing in the titles, but also does a great job of centering her story as much as that of “the man”. Colleagues, lovers, and bartenders mansplain to her. They can’t imagine that her detective capabilities are robust! We get the sense that for majority of season one and two, Helen also feels like a tourist in her own life, looking around at the bright things, unsuspecting of seedy underbellies, and passively letting shit happen to her, engagement, employment, diet programs, etc.

As she gains fast experience, we see her becoming more decisive, assertive and brave. The best parts of the show are her succeeding at detective work where others cannot, including an incredible deduction she makes while in a coma. The first season subordinated her as the man’s love interest. But season 2 finds us rooting for her, romance be damned!

Ok, back to the man. He’s extremely hot, and everyone keeps incompetently kidnapping him for stuff he did that he can’t remember. Elliot? Eugene? Good guy? Bad guy? We meet his mom, the effervescent looking Niahmn, and watch her stab a man through the eye. Surely he can’t be great if this was his raising. The man fears the worst when confronted with his past. Stories of his violence as a drug trafficker and gang member cloud their world. The revelations stun him, and he determines to change. He wants to stop the cycles of generational clan violence he discovers controlled his childhood and informed his life. Though Helen has absolved him of his sins and told him he has a fresh start, the main dissonance is about how much either of them believes that at any given time.

So I love season two. I watched it with the flu, and found myself mega-confused, just like the main characters. I was right there with them. By the final episode, the couple end up in Amsterdam. Helen is starting a business as a private investigator (GET IT, COLUMBO!), and the man is still rebuilding his past, present and future. Attempting to draw out lost memories, Helen plays him “Swan Lake”, and he transforms into a ballerina, focused, gliding and beautiful.

In an earlier episode, his troubled son studies “The Children of Lir” in Irish School. In this myth, pre-Christian King Lir’s children are cursed and transformed (by a jealous stepmother) into enchanted singing swans for 900 years. The beautiful birds suffer centuries of hardship, outcast to cold and dark waterways. When the curse lifts, they are old and dying, and are baptized and buried together. This legendary foreshadowing doesn’t bode well for our lovers! In the ending scene, the viewers get vital information that no character has yet seen, a further complicating thread in the identity of “the man”. Will Helen and the man suffer in isolation and stay together, doomed to a tragic end? Do they have the magic needed to break the curses of generational violence and false identities? Hopefully this is not a swan song, and season three awaits.