Series / Astrid

Commander Raphaëlle Coste and Astrid Nielsen

Astrid (originally Astrid et Raphaëlle and sometimes known as Bright Minds) is a Franco-Belgian Cop and Scientist-style Detective Drama that began airing with a Made-for-TV Movie in 2019, followed by regular seasons starting in the following year. The show was created by Alexandre De Seguins and Laurent Burtin in a co-production between France Televisions, JLA Productions, and Be Films.

Commander Raphaëlle Coste of the judicial police (Lola Dewaere), a woman with a deserved reputation as an impulsive, mercurial Cowboy Cop, is investigating the bizarre suicide by Self-Immolation of a wealthy man at the top of a parking garage. While looking into the case, she visits the Criminal Records office to look at a case file, but is handed an additional file from a cold case by a blonde archivist with an unusual gait.

Astrid Nielsen (Sara Mortensen) is a thirty-year-old woman on the autism spectrum. The daughter of a police detective, she has been fascinated with puzzles, including criminological ones, since she was a child and began sneaking looks at her father's case files; her father, since deceased, got her started at Criminal Records as an intern after she was forced out of public school. Astrid noticed similarities between Coste's current case and a case file she'd previously handled. Unfortunately, she's soon arrested because the previous victim happened to be her old psychiatrist, who had misdiagnosed her as schizophrenic, but after the mistaken identity is cleared up, she and Coste partner up to crack the case of a killer who leaves cattleya flowers at the scene of each crime.

As of 2023, Astrid et Raphaëlle has run for four seasons on France 2. The series was subtitled in English under the shortened title Astrid by Walter Presents and became available in the United States on PBS beginning November 2022. In the UK, the show has been broadcast on More4 under the title Astrid: Murder in Paris.

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Astrid contains examples of the following tropes:

• AB Negative: The victim in "Golden Blood" had a rare "Rhesus Null" blood type that made him a universal donor but only able to receive blood from other people with the same specific type.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Played for laughs between Raphe and Nicolas in season 3. After initially friend-zoning him, Raphe realizes during the season that she does have feelings for him after all (partly prompted by her son finally cluing her in to Nicolas's feelings), but he's started dating their coworker Arthur's sister. In the season finale, she finally confesses that she's fallen for him... and he blows up at her for doing this now when he was on the verge of getting over her, she replies in kind, then they furiously kiss each other before he storms off while cussing her out.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: At first, Niels is this to Astrid, repeatedly forcing her out of her comfort zone, not to mention she is uncomfortable with children's impredictability to begin with. Eventually, once she figures out what boundaries to set and agrees to make him a part of her routine, she comes to appreciate his curiosity and first-degree bluntness.
• Artistic License – Medicine: At the beginning of "Fulcanelli", the body of the victim of a decades-old murder is mistakenly assumed to be fresh, due to a lack of apparent decomposition. This is explained by the victim's flesh being transformed into adipocere (a waxy substance produced when bodies decompose in wet, but anaerobic, conditions). In the real-world, an adipocere corpse is still discoloured and deformed enough to be impossible to mistake for a fresh one.
• The Atoner: Brother Louis, the victim in "Memento Mori", became a monk after he killed a man who had raped his girlfriend, and when he was killed in revenge by the rapist's brother, spent his last moments forgiving his killer and trying to destroy the evidence against him.
• Balkan Bastard: The murderer in "The Fermi Paradox" turns out to be a fugitive Bosnian Serb war criminal.
• Beneath Notice: In "The Starling", the killer escapes from the scene by dressing as a forensic technician and leaving with the rest.
• Bittersweet Ending: To "Invisible", the first season finale. Astrid's guardian Gaillard has been murdered, but it turns out that he had already begun proceedings to emancipate her, which then takes place. Astrid has also won the respect and sympathy of her previously mocking and uncomprehending colleagues at the archives.
• Brown Note: The murder weapon in "Fermata" is an infrasound generator, which causes one victim to die from a burst brain aneurysm, and another to die when his artificial heart valve jammed.
• Bullet Holes and Revelations: The climax of "In Custody". Raph is on the point of talking the hostage taker into releasing her hostage, when he sees an opening and attacks her. Raph rushes in, and there's a Gun Struggle that ends in a gunshot before the hostage taker is hauled away. Then it's revealed that the shot hit Raph. She's not badly hurt and returns to work with her arm in a sling.
• Chastity Couple: Justified and played with. Astrid is very touch-averse and hates sharing her space, which she explains to Tetsuo very early in their relationship; as he's a shy and respectful guy, he follows her lead. She eventually becomes comfortable enough to kiss him, though it takes a lot of mental prep.
• Character Catchphrase: Astrid often repeats herself.
  • "I will be late, one must not be late."
  • She also uses the phrase "body of corroborating evidence" at least once an episode; it fits with her MO of comparing thousands of clues from thousands of files in order to connect dots no one else would or could notice.
  • In early episodes, and occasionally later when under stress, she repeats "I am capable, I am qualified" to justify her involvement in investigations.
• Character Tic: Astrid has a lot:
  • Walking up or down stairs by putting first one foot and then the other on the same step.
  • Walking with her arms by her sides, holding her hands out at right angles by bending her wrists.
  • She also stims very often by wiggling her hands when she needs extra focus to think or interract with others.
  • She has a very specific diction, which makes her insist on consonants and always finish her sentences on the same neutral tone.
• Chekhov's Gun: In "Invisible", Astrid waxes poetic to Raph about composer Johann Sebastian Bach, specifically that he ciphered his own name into two pieces using the German musical scale. When she's kidnapped by the Serial Killer, he makes her re-shelve the files on his kills lest they be used to identify him, but she leaves them shelved in a pattern imitating Bach's cipher and spelling out the killer's name (he's one of their own forensics techs).
• Chekhov's Gunman: The blonde woman named Mathilde who explains Laure Gana's disorder to Raph and Astrid in one scene of "Haunting" is Astrid's Missing Mom.
• Da Chief: Astrid's boss Commissaire Bachert.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Raph's prosecutor boyfriend Mathias only appears in the second season and vanishes without explanation in the third. Presumably the events of "In Custody" caused enough professional and personal conflict between them that they broke up.
• Conspiracy Theorist: "Global Plan" centres around the murder of an astronomer whose discovery of a secret satellite aroused conspiracy theories. The conspiracy film-makers are depicted as con artists who rely on Manipulative Editing, and the murder turns out to be because of sexual jealousy over one of them having sex with the astronomer.
• Consulting a Convicted Killer: The murderer from season one's "Locked Room" tries to seduce Astrid into having a relationship like this with him in the third season's "Unlocked Room".
• Contemplation Location: Astrid has an austere, otherwise-unused room within the archive building where she goes to work on her most difficult problems. It's a big thing whenever anybody else is allowed inside.
• Contrived Coincidence: The escaped inmate in "In Custody" was inspired to seek Astrid out because she was a cellmate of Sympathetic Murderer Violetta Flores from the pilot.
• Cop and Scientist: The main protagonists of the series are Cowboy Cop Raphaëlle Coste and archivist and amateur criminologist Astrid Nielsen.
• The Coroner: Dr. Henry Fournier, a grumpy, grizzled old doctor. He's initially dismissive and hostile towards Astrid; however, after her suggestions for closer checks on autopsies in "Puzzles" and "The Haunting" prove correct, he warms up to her and starts being more thorough in his examinations in hopes of anticipating her. She in turn tries to be nicer to him after Coste explains she's being a little rude by questioning his expertise so bluntly.
• Cut Apart: In "Invisible", we see intercutting scenes of the killer exercising and then hearing a knock at his door, and the police knocking on their suspect's door. It's then revealed that the police are arresting another, innocent, man, and the killer is receiving a package from a courier service.
• Daddy's Girl: Astrid was raised by her single father, a Doting Parent who struggled but more often than not managed to make the best of a complicated situation. Astrid was a wreck when he died and still keeps his bedroom untouched in her apartment.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • Astrid's mother disappeared when she was too young to remember her, and she was hounded out of public school by ableist bullying from virtually her entire class, and is fearful of mental hospitals due to an early misdiagnosis of schizophrenia and multiple authority figures insisting she be institutionalized. Her father is portrayed more sympathetically in flashbacks and got her the job at Criminal Records, but he's still shown making a number of (well-intentioned) errors in raising her.
  • Raphaëlle's past isn't as bad, but she has a strained relationship with her father, a senior lawyer whom she fears she disappointed, a sister whom she dislikes and views as shallow and selfish, and a junkie brother who died young due to his addiction.
• Dead Guy Junior: A version of this for Niels Langlais, who is Angus Nielsen's son.
• Defective Detective: Astrid is highly gifted as a detective, but her autism is definitely strong enough to go beyond "cute" eccentricity and cause her severe distress at times.
• Dies Wide Open: A plot point in "Invisible". When people die with their eyes open, the corneas rapidly cloud over due to oxidation, but this doesn't happen with the eyelids shut. The Body of the Week's eyes are cloudy but closed, which leads Astrid to suspect that the killer closed them after a lengthy interval, and provides her a clue to the Serial Killer's M.O.
• Disability Immunity:
  • The killer in "Invisible" has hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, which means that he has no hair anywhere on his body and no sweat glands, so he leaves very few forensic traces behind him.
  • In "Irezumi", Raphaëlle is constantly struggling with the people related to the Body of the Week, as they're sticklers for Japanese social rules and won't even say a word to someone who doesn't act properly around them. However, since anything social is a practiced skill for Astrid, she has no default social behavior to hamper her and is actually able to navigate these very codified interractions more easily than the laid-back attitudes of her French entourage.
• Disowned Parent: Astrid's mother Mathilde abandoned the family when Astrid was an infant, out of fear she might harm her autistic daughter as her own mother had Mathilde's autistic brother. She tries to reconnect with the now-30-year-old Astrid in season 1, but Astrid rejects her as a parent, having no emotional connection to her that way. Instead, having reconnected with her at a tangram tournament, she chooses to think of her as "Mathilde the fabulous tangram player". They eventually develop a friendship strong enough for Astrid to invite her to her appartment.
• Establishing Character Moment: Astrid's first scene has her being hit on by a bunch of youths hanging around outside the archive, and completely failing to notice.
• Expy: The creators have publicly said that Astrid and Raph were originally imagined as a female version of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
• False Friend: In the school flashback scenes in "Haunted", one of Astrid's female classmates initially appears sympathetic to her and interested in her talk about puzzles, but then joins in with the bullying and cruelly imitates her.
• Fan Disservice: "Missing Link" has an extended shot of full-frontal female nudity, in the form of the nude cadaver of the Body of the Week after Dr. Fournier finished the autopsy and stitched her back up.
• Famed In-Story: When Astrid attends police academy, she has initially a traumatic flashback to her last, disastrous time attending public school. Once the other police cadets realize who she is, however, they turn out to be admirers of her work with the judicial police, and one even criticizes the instructor for putting her on the spot and causing her to have a burnout.
• Faux Death: In "Death and Company", Paul is near-fatally poisoned with tetrodotoxin, but revives when the embalmer injects him with his propriety preservation mixture, which contains strychnine.
• Foreshadowing: At the end of "In Custody" (the season 2 finale), immediately after Commissaire Bachert tells Raphaëlle that Astrid is barred from participating in future investigations due to her not being a police officer, there's a dialogue-free scene that takes place in a hallway outside the Crime Squad's office (specifically, the scene where Raphaëlle tries to phone Astrid) in which a recruitment poster emblazoned with the phrase "DEVENEZ POLICIER" (which translates to "become a police officer" in English) in large red letters is visible in the background, thus foreshadowing the next season's ongoing story arc which this page's No Badge? No Problem! entry describes in more detail.
• Frame-Up: In "Invisible", a woman is murdered, with the eyelids closed after, and the forensic evidence leads to her pot dealer, who lives in the same building and is awaiting trial for assault. However, he insists he's innocent, and something feels off to Astrid. She discovers a total of thirteen murders where the eyelids were closed afterward and the defendant was convicted based solely on forensic evidence and insisted on their innocence. She concludes they're dealing with a Serial Killer who frames innocent people for his murders. Ironically, when the killer realizes she's onto him, he kills her mentor Mr. Gaillard and stages the scene to make it look like she did it, but she leaves clues that lead the team right to him.
• Fright Deathtrap: Wilfrid Tarquin's death in "The Haunting". He was literally scared to death (takotsubo cardiomyopathy) by seeing a man he had murdered decades ago in the audience of his trial (it was actually the man's similar-looking son, who just meant to frighten him into confessing).
• Ghostwriter: The subject of "Locked Room". The victim, a crime writer, is thought to have also written a literary novel and had another writer act as frontman for him because his publisher didn't want an ambitious non-genre work. It turned out that the true situation was the other way around, with the alleged literary writer having written the crime novels and using the victim as a frontman for them.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: In "In Custody", when Raph and Astrid are under arrest following the hostage debacle at the archive, Astrid contacts William's brother in his role as a doctor, and gets him to pass on a message to the support group to track down the potential perpetrators of the original murder.
• Greek Chorus: Astrid regularly attends a support group for people on the spectrum, whose discussions are frequently relevant to her cases.
• Hacker Cave: William's flat is filled with assorted computer equipment.
• Hates Being Touched: Astrid gets overstimulated easily, with physical contact being a particular stressor. This causes a problem in season 3 when she begins contemplating a First Kiss with her boyfriend Tetsuo. She finally works up the courage to try kissing him in "Golden Blood", asking him to close his eyes and not move so that she can control the contact.
• High-Class Call Girl: Ambre in "The Starling" is an expensive escort who specialises in "girlfriend experience".
• Hollywood Autism: Reconstructed. While the series still leans on a number of the common Hollywood tropes about autism (such as Astrid being an Inspirationally Disadvantaged genius criminologist with a borderline photographic memory for factoids), it does go to a lot of effort to present people on the spectrum as accurately and respectfully as possible. One of the series' lead writers is autistic and they have autistic people beta-read the scripts, and Astrid's actress Sara Mortensen sat in on autism support groups to learn her role. Astrid's own autism group plays a significant role in several episodes. Astrid's particular symptoms are (in no particular order): a special interest in puzzles (criminology is an extension of this), being prone to meltdowns in noisy environments or if her daily routine is disrupted, difficulty with idioms and social cues, and having an odd gait and avoiding eye contact.
• Hostage Situation: The concept of "In Custody". Astrid and Raph smuggle a convicted murderer who claims to be innocent into the archive so that they can check the records of her case, but when one of the other archivists challenges her she panics and takes them hostage.
• I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Anne Langlais, Astrid's police academy instructor, turns out to be a reformed Dirty Cop who fell in love with Astrid's father Angus while trying to wreck his organized crime investigation. The leader of the gang, an import/export executive, took her son hostage to make her warn him of a raid by Angus; she thought he would just move the goods, but he instead had Angus killed. Anne is now trying to make up for what she did by ensuring Astrid passes the academy.
• Imagine Spot: In "Natives", when Max visits the archive to translate some emails written in Atikamekw, he imagines himself dancing in Cheyenne clothing to give himself strength to visit a new and intimidating place.
• Important Haircut: Raph cutting her hair in season 4 isn't that big a deal, but it is to Astrid, who struggles a lot with change.
• Insistent Terminology: It's "puzzle", not "brain-teaser" ("casse-tête" or "headbreaker" in French), because Astrid thinks visually and dislikes the image the word invokes. This is the source of a minor joke in "Natives": Astrid insists on calling the murder weapon a "mace" even though its technical name is a "head-cracker" in the literal sense, seemingly associating it with her disliked term for puzzles.
• Internal Affairs: In "In Custody", Astrid and Raph are questioned by a stern but eventually sympathetic internal affairs officer named Wurlitzer who is investigating the hostage situation and their behaviour that helped cause it.
• Jerkass: Mathias patronises Raph both in their work and in private, lies to her son in front of her about whether they're dating, and eats her food in restaurants. He must be really good in bed for her to put up with him.
• Libation for the Dead: In "Irezumi", Ken places a burning cigarette upright on the ground and pours some sake out in memory of a dead friend who he killed. At the end of the episode, Astrid does the same outside the archive building for her mentor Gaillard.
• Limited Wardrobe: Astrid always wears her hair in a tight ponytail and keeps the same outfit (black skinny jeans, blue cotton shirt, black wool sweater), even in flashbacks. Eventually, she explains to Niels that it makes it simpler to get dressed in the morning, and that the soft fabrics help with her Sensory Overload.
• Like Brother and Sister: In "Death and Company", when Nicolas tries to confess his love to Raph, she misunderstands him as being jealous of her friendship with Astrid and tells him that she loves him like a brother.
• Literal-Minded:
  • Astrid is a bit literal-minded and often has trouble with figurative language, one of the worst cases being a near-meltdown after Raph texts her to "drop everything" when the Body of the Week drops in the middle of Astrid's weekly grocery shopping trip, disrupting her routine. After a couple of such miscommunications, Raph learns to tell Astrid much more precisely what she needs from her.
  • At one point in "Global Plan", Raph mentions something about the police having been given orders "from above" (meaning from the national government). Astrid's immediate reaction to this is to look straight up at the ceiling.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: The plot of "Golden Blood" involves a little girl who is dying of sickle-cell disease, but can only receive blood from another person with the same extremely rare blood group.
• Locked Room Mystery: "Locked Room". A famously reclusive author is found dead in his locked apartment of an apparent suicide by cyanide, but nobody can find the poison bottle, which leads Astrid to suspect murder. The killer put the cyanide in the victim's ice cube tray and then just waited for him to use the cubes in his whiskey.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Laure Gana in "The Haunting" was involved with a French neo-Nazi group but fell in love with a Tunisian immigrant who got her pregnant. The other members murdered him.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • The haunted house in the second episode could just be a creaky old house with an ergot fungus problem. But even Astrid is open to the idea that it could really be haunted by the ghost of a murdered chambermaid (at least, to the extent that she doesn't think that there's sufficient evidence either to believe in or disbelieve in ghosts). Then, in the final shot, we see the deserted house from outside at night, and the candelabra-carrying ghost Raphaëlle saw moves through an upper floor.
  • "Memento Mori" never addresses whether the "apparition" both the victim and the abbot reported seeing was the genuine article, mostly because it turns out to be a Red Herring unrelated to the murder.
  • In season 4, a man is stabbed by a woman who claims to be his time-traveling Child by Rape, looking to protect the world from his influence as a future politician and avenge her mother. It turns out that she was the impregnated rape victim, and was diagnosed with severe psychosis years back; the team deduces that her mind made up the time travel story to cope. When Raph meets the woman's young daughter at the end of the episode, however, she is bearing the exact same scar on her arm as the alleged time traveller. As Astrid points out, while time travel has never existed in the past, there is no evidence that it will never exist in the future.
• MockGuffin: In "Fulcanelli", the secret treasure of the alchemist Fulcanelli, which at least two murders have been committed for, is a chemical recipe to prepare elemental phosphorus, which since the Industrial Revolution is no longer very special.
• New Old Flame: In the second season, Raphaëlle rekindles her affair with Mathias Forest, a public prosecutor whom she used to date when they were both in law school.
• No Badge? No Problem!: Zig-Zagged. Astrid is an Amateur Sleuth whose day job is handling documents at the Criminal Records building, but regularly examines crime scenes and sometimes even interviews witnesses (though this is rare because her challenges with social cues make this difficult). Up until the season 2 finale, this is largely let slide because she's so helpful, but then her attempt to clear the name of an innocent woman turns into a Hostage Situation that ends with Raph getting shot in the shoulder trying to protect the real killer from the hostage-taker, leading to her getting banned from taking part in any further investigations. However, in the season 3 premiere, she manages to impress the Prefect of Police when she helps resolve a murder case that turned political. The Prefect overturns her firing, but only on condition that Astrid attend and pass police academy within the year. She does, almost by accident, because she walked out of the oral exam after having an "Eureka!" Moment in the case, but her willingness to prioritize solving the case over keeping her job impressed the examiners and they passed her. She's given the rank of lieutenant in the judicial police, ending the show's use of the trope altogether.
• Now Allowed to Hug: Invoked by Astrid, who normally Hates Being Touched because one of her autism symptoms is hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli. This causes a problem when she decides she wants to try having a First Kiss with her boyfriend Tetsuo, who fortunately is a very Understanding Boyfriend. In the end she starts by asking him to close his eyes and remain very still so that she can control the contact.
• Omniglot: Justified in "Natives". Max, one of Astrid's autism group members, is revealed to speak 41 languages (they're his special interest), of which 34 are First Nations tongues he's trying to preserve (he's Cheyenne by birth). Conveniently, one of them is Atikamekw, a Canadian Algonquin language spoken by a tribe of same name involved in the Case of the Week.
• Out-Gambitted: In "Invisible", one of Astrid's coworkers knocks a can of toothpicks on the ground in front of her and asks if she can count them (a Shout-Out to a scene in Rain Man). She says she can't, but then tells him that it's possible to make four equilateral triangles with just six toothpicks, and then walks off. He's shown later to have spent practically the whole day working on it, and develops a new respect for Astrid when he figures out the trick.^note You have to think in 3D and stack some of the toothpicks on top of the others.
• Parental Abandonment: Astrid's mother Mathilde left when Astrid was an infant, after she was diagnosed: it's revealed that a sexist psychiatrist unsubtly blamed her for Astrid's ASD^note French psychiatry has a reputation for dealing with autism badly, due to stubbornly holding on to the "refrigerator mother" psychoanalytic theory that claimed autism was caused by a lack of maternal affection long after it was abandoned elsewhere, and also that Mathilde herself had an autistic younger brother whom their mother murdered and she feared she might do the same to her own child. Astrid's father did his best to raise her properly by himself, but died in the line of duty a few years back.
• Phantom Thief: The title character in "The Starling" is a wealthy lawyer, who is secretly a burglar who pulls off spectacular heists without any violence.
• Plagiarism in Fiction: The motive for the murder in "Missing Link" — the killer murdered the victim in order to plagiarise a scientific discovery that they'd made but hadn't yet written up.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: In-Universe example. By mid-season 2, people in the precinct have started calling the leads "Astraëlle".
• Put on a Bus: At the end of season 3, the victim's widow steals Arthur's gun from his holster and kills the culprit, who was probably going to get away with his crime. Arthur, while recognized innocent by the following inquiry, is deeply distraught by this and decides to leave the force.
• Quip to Black: Fournier pulls an understated one on Raph in "Memento Mori". Off Astrid's deduction that a murdered Benedictine monk wiped off the candle spike he was fatally stabbed with, Raph wonders aloud what kind of victim would protect his own murderer.
  Fournier: You're not going to like it. (tips his head at the icon of Christ on the cross)
• Rail Enthusiast: William, the leader of Astrid's support group, is a railway enthusiast with a particular love of the État 231G class Pacific, and the first time he uses his computer skills to help with a case, Raphaëlle rewards him with tickets for a heritage train excursion.
• Reclusive Artist: An In-Universe example in "Locked Room". Francoeur, the victim, was a detective story writer who was famously agoraphobic and socialised very little. Subverted as he wasn't actually the writer.
• Red Baron: berezin_28. Even William, who has been in an online relationship with her for five years, doesn't know her real name. It eventually comes out when she is officially needed by the police (it's Camille).
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Raphaëlle's "red" warmth, emotionality, and disorganisation are contrasted with the "blue" ultra-controlled Astrid.
• Repressed Memories: Sophia in "The Fermi Paradox" has repressed memories of seeing her family massacred during The Yugoslav Wars, which she falsely interprets as signs of alien abduction.
• Retired Monster: The killer in "The Fermi Paradox" is a fugitive Bosnian Serb war criminal, who committed the murder when he was recognised by a survivor of an atrocity he helped to commit.
• Reverse Whodunnit: The killer in "Invisible" is introduced as such in the first moments of the episode, although we don't find out his full identity until partway through the episode.
• Revisiting the Cold Case: Justified: Astrid's day job at Criminal Records means that lots of episodes involve looking at old case files, often from unsolved crimes, and connecting them to the Case of the Week. This ultimately includes the unsolved murder of Astrid's own father in the season 3 finale.
• Sacrificial Lion: Gaillard, Astrid's guardian and mentor, is murdered in "Invisible", the S1 finale.
• Sadist Teacher: Jacques Leibnitz, the organ teacher in "Fermata", whose extreme perfectionism and harsh approach drove at least two of his students to suicide attempts, one of whom then murdered him.
• Schedule Fanatic: Astrid has extremely regular schedules, going shopping on exactly the same days and times each week. This leads to her having a crisis when Raph texts her about the Body of the Week dropping in the middle of her shopping trip, due to Raph saying "drop everything"; after this incident, Raph learns to be more careful about how she says things to her.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: In "Global Plan", the killer electrocutes the victim in an elaborate way to make it appear that the murder was done using some kind of top secret Mad Science military weapon, in order to suggest that he was the victim of a government conspiracy.
• Sensory Overload: Autistic people often have difficulty with an excess of sensory stimuli. Astrid routinely wears construction-grade hearing protection when she has to go out on the city streets, and gets sent into a full-blown meltdown in "The Haunting" when a careless remark about the Body of the Week's very public death during opening statements of a big trial causes her to be swarmed by reporters. In season 3 it also interferes with her desire to have a First Kiss with her boyfriend Tetsuo: she ultimately asks him to close his eyes and stay very still so that she can control the contact.
• Sex for Services: In "Global Plan", the team acquires the uncut version of a video interview of the victim, a celebrity astronomer, by one of the suspects, a Conspiracy Theorist making a Documentary of Lies about the eponymous New World Order-style cabal. The first part of the interview, which was fully left out of the film, shows the astronomer refuting the conspiracy theory, but then there's a cut, and the astronomer is shown taking his seat again looking noticeably more unkempt before now backing up the conspiracy theory. They notice in a reflection that the documentarian's clothes are similarly more rumpled than before and realize that she had sex with him in exchange for backing her up.
• Sexual Euphemism: After a conversation in which Raph describes a date she went on and ends it with a tasteful ellipsis ("... and boom, y'know"), Astrid starts referring to sex as "going boom".
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Raph. It surprises Astrid at first, but eventually it comes to amuse her.
• Shout-Out:
  • Astrid herself is sometimes compared to Rain Man, usually in the context of ableist harassment and bullying, including a Troubled Backstory Flashback in "The Haunting". In "Invisible", a coworker knocks a can of toothpicks on the ground to get her to count them.
  • In the later seasons, starting with "Fermata", at William's suggestion, Astrid keeps dried beans in her pockets and moves them from one side of her body to another as a way of keeping track of how much strain she's under and avoiding meltdowns, a literalisation of "spoon theory" in English-speaking disability culture.
  • The victims in "Puzzle" are all named for ciphers of Jurassic Park characters: Alain Grant (Alan Grant), Denis Nedry (Dennis Nedry), and Yann Malcolm (Ian Malcolm). Raphaëlle also speaks to a Dr. Thierry Rex by phone.
  • Sherlock Holmes:
    • Astrid's comment in "Puzzle" about memory not being infinitely expandable is something Holmes said to Watson in A Study in Scarlet.
    • In episode 7, Astrid quotes Holmes's line, "When you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth" from The Sign of the Four.
  • The cattleya flowers left as a Calling Card by the killer in the pilot is a reference to a Marcel Proust novel, Un amour de Swann, where the main character uses the expression "to do cattleya" as a euphemism for sex. The perpetrator was trafficked as a child and is taking revenge on the men who raped her and her sister and accidentally killed the latter.
  • "The Haunting" has a bunch of Star Wars references. Laure Gana and Wilfred Tarquin reference Leia Organa and Wilhuff Tarkin from A New Hope; there's also a mention of a Max Rebo (the Ortolan keyboardist in Return of the Jedi), while a past victim is a man named Jabbah, born in Tataouine, Tunisia (referring to respectively Jabba the Hutt, the town the planet Tatooine was named after, and the country where most of the Tatooine scenes were shot).
  • In "Missing Link" characters are named after those from the original Ghostbusters (1984) — the victim is Dana Barett (the exact same name) and suspects include Raymond Stans (Raymond Stantz) and Pierre Venkman (Peter Venkman).
  • In "Locked Room", Astrid starts to list the various potential solutions of a locked-room mystery. This is a quotation from the list given in the Dr. Gideon Fell novel The Hollow Man / The Three Coffins.
  • "The Man Who Never Was":
    • The episode is titled after The Man Who Never Was. It involves a Body of the Week that uses several false identities, where the film was about a corpse with a manufactured background that was used to deliver disinformation to the Axis before the invasion of Italy.
    • The Body of the Week's aliases are all aliases used by Arsène Lupin in various novels: Louis Valméras in The Hollow Needle, Maxime Bermond in Arsène Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes, and Victor Hautin from Victor of the Wordly Brigade.
  • "Death and Company":
    • When the support group are discussing bereavement after the (apparent) death of William's brother, Max brings up the beginning of The Stranger, where Meursault is judged for not crying at his mother's funeral.
    • When the enbalmer tells Raph about Paul's revival after his apparent death, he quotes the French translation of the "no more room in Hell" epigram from Dawn of the Dead (1978).
  • "The Fermi Paradox"
    • The title of the episode, which involves a murder associated with apparent UFO phenomena, refers to the real-world question of "if life is common in the universe, why have we never seen any unambiguous evidence of it outside Earth?".
    • Vincent David, the leader of the support group for alien abductees, is named after David Vincent, the protagonist of The Invaders (1967), which was about evil aliens infiltrating Earth.
  • "Unlocked Room": Characters are named after those in House — Foreman, Cuddy and Demaison ("House").
  • "Golden Blood": Characters are named after those in Dracula — the victim is Jonathan, another character is called Mina, and medical supplies are from a company called "Helsing".
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: The killer in "Invisible" tries to get Astrid to think that they're the same, as he was bullied for his physical disabilities. Astrid responds that she didn't turn her pain into hatred like him.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Anne Langlais reveals in the season 3 finale that Angus Nielsen got her pregnant before his murder, meaning Astrid has a seven-year-old half-brother. She asks Astrid to take care of him since she's headed to prison for killing the Corrupt Corporate Executive behind Angus's murder.
• Speech-Impeded Love Interest: berezin_28, William's girlfriend, is fully non-verbal, and uses text-to-speech to communicate. Don't be fooled by her Cute Mute appearance, though; she's a dark web hacker by trade.
• Struggling Single Mother: Raph is divorced from her teenage son's father and is frequently shown scrambling to balance being a mom with her police career. Fortunately her son is pretty well-behaved, and he also quickly takes a liking to Astrid as a surrogate big sister.
• Suicide by Cop: In "The Man Who Never Was", Cassandre provokes the prison warders into shooting her by taking Raph hostage and then pretending to cut her throat (but only inflicting a minor wound).
• Sure, Let's Go with That: In the pilot, Raph has got into trouble with both Theo's school and her ex-husband by not being there to pick him up at the end of the school day. At one point, she sends Astrid to pick him up, and Theo instantly realises what's going on and greets her as "Auntie".
• Sympathetic Murder Backstory: "Memento Mori": The Body of the Week turns out to have accidentally beaten his girlfriend's rapist to death 15 years ago, then left the country to become a Benedictine monk out of guilt. He was in turn killed after being transferred back to Paris by the man's vengeful younger brother—and told the younger man he forgave him as the man stabbed him to death.
• Sympathetic Murderer:
  • The killer in "Puzzle". Violetta Flores and her sister Cattleya were forced into prostitution as teenagers and sold to rich overseas visitors in Columbia. Her three victims were the men who took them onto a boat, gang-raped them both, and accidentally killed Cattleya, and she started hunting them down when the police in both Columbia and France wouldn't touch the case of a Disposable Sex Worker.
  • Downplayed in "The Haunting". The victim turns out to be a former member of a French neo-Nazi group who killed a female member's Tunisian boyfriend, causing her to go insane. The "killer" planted a bomb on his car (which goes off when it's towed), but says he only meant to scare him into confessing because he's the woman's son. The actual cause of death was Takotsubo cardiomyopathy resulting from him accidentally scaring the victim to death because he looks similar to his murdered father.
  • Subverted in "Natives". One suspect confesses to killing the first victim out of revenge for his role in getting him sent to a boarding school where he and his friends were mistreated for being First Nations. Astrid realizes he didn't do it because he gets details of the crime wrong in his confession. Turns out he was trying to take the fall for his father.
  • In the last episode of season 3, Astrid and Anne finally find out who killed Angus, Astrid's dad, but the murderer is likely to get away with it due to his influence, so Anne chooses to shoot him dead instead. She goes to prison, but Astrid often visits her in prison and she remains a sympathetic character, especially due to being Niels's mother.
• Take That!: The first season takes a number of potshots at Rain Man, a film which is widely despised among people on the autism spectrum for being the Trope Codifier for Hollywood Autism. Astrid is shown in a flashback being bullied by kids in her class calling her "Rain Man" as an insult.
• Theme Naming: In "In Custody", three of the guest characters are named after types of electric or electronic musical instrument. The woman who takes Astrid and Raph hostage is named "Martenot", the internal affairs officer who questions Raph and Astrid is named "Wurlitzer", and the head of the SWAT team is named "Korg".
• Time-Delayed Death: In "Missing Link", the victim was nearly drowned by the killer and survived, but died later in the day due to secondary drowning.
• Time-Shifted Actor: Astrid is played as a child by Sylvie Filloux and Raph by Chloé Chevallier.
• Tomboyish Name: Raphaëlle is often called Raph, a nickname more evocative of the male version of the name.
• Trauma Button: In "Unlocked Room", Astrid has to investigate a murder in the secure ward of a mental hospital, and suffers tramatic flashbacks to her own forced hospitalisation as a teenager.
• Tropaholics Anonymous: Astrid's autism-spectrum support group plays a major role in the show.
• Understanding Boyfriend: Tetsuo Tanaka is extremely considerate of Astrid's autism-related challenges with intimacy, and allows her to go at her own pace in their relationship. He explains once that he personally "gets it": while neurotypical, he's naturally shy and awkward, which was compounded when he was younger by being socially isolated in France due to being an immigrant.
• Unknown Relative:
  • Astrid's mother abandoned her when she was an infant; when they meet again in season 1, no one knows who she is at first.
  • In season 3, Astrid finds out that Anne, her tutor at the police academy, was actually her late father's girlfriend for several years before he died - he never mentioned her to his daughter because he did not want to cause her distress, but they were building up to introducing the two when he died. The reason for that was that Anne was pregnant, and Astrid has a young half-brother.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Astrid's late father is shown in several flashbacks calling out various authority figures, from her psychiatrist Alain Grant to her school principal, for mistreatment of her.
• Will They or Won't They?: Raphaëlle and Nicolas, who are blatantly in love but afraid to ruin their many years of friendship.
• Yakuza: The murder in "Irezumi" is related to Yakuza members living as ex-pats in France, although it's the result of a familial conflict rather than organised crime.

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