Series / Black Spot

Black Spot is a French-Belgian television supernatural thriller.

In the series, a new prosecutor named Franck Siriani moves to the town of Villefranche, a small sleepy town surrounded by a large, dark forest, to investigate the murder rate there, which is six times the national average. Police Major Laurène Weiss is the main person on the search for these cases with a dark past and a troubled relationship with her daughter and the mayor. Furthermore, the woods surrounding the town are an exceptionally mysterious place where many crimes happen and where weird things may be coming from.

The show's first season was released in 2017, while the second one was released in 2019, and globally released by Netflix. France 2, the network that originally aired it, has since cancelled the series.

Tropes

• Abusive Parents: Gerald does not believe a father should automatically love his son, and that a father's love should be earned. He also tells Bertrand he could never earn it and tries to kill him.
• Always Murder: With few exceptions, all cases the characters investigate end up involving a murder. Justified in that the town has six times the national average of murders.
• Ambiguously Evil: Cernunnos, the god entity that lives in the woods. He is a mysterious figure and its allegiance and goals are unclear, with Laurène suspecting him of being involved in her kidnapping when she was young, as well as being on the receiving end of human sacrifices over the course of the years. On the other side, Sabine swears that he is a benevolent deity that only intends to protect the forest and will treat them right if they treat the woods right, and he does resurrect Lairène when she died.
• Arc Symbol: The infinity symbol
• Asshole Victim:
  • Bruno Winkler is revealed to have sexually assaulted Sandra Chevrier and attempted to hang himself, only rendering himself comatose due to brain damage.
  • After everything he did to his granddaughter, his son, and his lackeys, nobody will miss Gerald when he gets his comeuppance in the Season 2 finale.
• Back from the Dead: Laurène is killed by Camille early in the final episode of season one. The final episode shows that something in the woods brought her back by half-burying her in grass.
• The Bear: Martial Ferrandis is a large-bodied gay member of the police force with a large beard. He is even called "Teddy Bear" by his friends.
• The Beastmaster: Cernunnos, as the god of the woods, controls the animals that exist there. The crows that often fly around the police station are implied to be his servants, as well as the bees that attacked people in "In Another Life".
• Bee Afraid: In "In Another Life", a series of near-fatal bee attacks are taking place in the town. They ultimately take the killer down and are implied to have been sent by Cernunnos to kill him specifically.
• Blackmail: "The Secret Behind the Window" has this as a motivation. The victim was a man with a mentally handicapped son who had been taking random pictures of people and he used the incriminating pictures to blackmail a large number of people and gather money for his son.
• Dark and Troubled Past: When she was young, Laurène was kidnapped and kept chained in the woods for 3 days, only surviving because she cut off two of her fingers so she could free herself. She never got over that and is still trying to understand what happened.
• Don't Go Into the Woods: The woods around Villefranche are wide-spreading, deep, and dark, and several strange and supernatural occurrences happen in it. It is also haunted by an antlered figure that could be an avatar to the Celtic God Cernunnos or a regular mad man that kidnaps people for Celtic sacrifices.
• Driven to Suicide: "Dark Heroes" has an investigation regarding a woman who killed herself on the day her husband got a medal of honor. It's later revealed that this is because her husband was a rapist who had assaulted at least one woman on a cabin they owned.
• Driving Question:
  • What happened to Marion, the mayor's daughter? Camille turned out to be the one behind her disappearance and death. She was hired by the mayor's father to shake her down and get the information she was gathering, but ended up killing her by accident.
  • What is in the woods? This is a question more for the viewer than the character. While the viewer gets hints of a strange antlered being living in the woods, the characters are blind to that mystery. This changes in season 2, where Laurène, after being resurrected by the antlered figure, believes it might be the mad man in the woods that kidnapped her.
• Fingore: 20 years ago, Laurène lost two fingers in what she claims was an accident (it's made clear relatively early on that she didn't lose them by chance, but that she had been abudcted back then and intentionally cut her fingers off in order to get her hand out of a manacle that had her chained to a wall).
• Found Footage: "No More Walks in The Woods" cold opens with a recording in this style of a group of teenagers camping in the forest from one of their phones when they hear something strange from further in the dark. The rest of the episode has people seeing the footage many times over the course of the investigation, trying to find clues about it.
• Genius Loci: It's implied the forest has some sort of sentience, as many characters like Sabine refer to the forest and the trees as being alive and having feelings and thoughts, like Jeanne saying that the trees like it when she plays the piano for them, and even that they are upset at the way the mayor's family have been treating them. It's unclear whether Cernunnos is that sentience, a separate being that lives side by side with it, if he controls it, etc.
• Greater-Scope Villain: If Sabine is to be believed and Cernunnos really is simply a forest guardian, Gerald Steiner is the one behind a lot of the problems in the town that pulls in supernatural forces to protect the forest. Even if Cernunnos is evil, Gerald plays a huge role in keeping the town a mess, being interested only in keeping his money and his illegal dealings to the detriment of the town's ecosystem, and, indirectly, was responsible for Marion's death, as he was the one to put Camille on her trail.
• Human Sacrifice: Laurène starts season 2 suspecting that her kidnapping might be connected with one and she was gonna be sacrificed by her kidnapper. A flashback to 50 BC shows Roman soldiers in the region finding the shrine where those sacrifices happened and Laurène starts looking for it.
• Informed Deformity: The disfigured recluse Hugo in S 2 E 5. While he is seriously scarred, he isn't so terribly replusive that his mother would leave him over it.
• Irony: Soapbox Sadie Cora is protesting for the existence of the sawmill, not against it, somewhat ironic because she is implied to strongly favor environmental causes.
• Kill and Replace: "In Another Life", the killer is so ridden with self-hate that he murders someone just to take their place and be someone else.
• Killing in Self-Defense:
  • In the season 1 finale, Camille gets killed by Cora, speared by a piece of wood as she is threatening to shoot Cora.
  • In the first case of season 2, Laurène kills the murderer with a sword she finds when he has her at gunpoint.
• Laser-Guided Karma: This happens to Gerald in the Season 2 finale. After all of his crooked operations, the abuse he delivered to his son and henchmen, and murdering his own granddaughter, he is outwitted by the son he abused and attempted to kill, betrayed by his followers, shot in the leg by his son, left for dead in the woods, and eaten alive by a wolf.
• Lovecraft Country: A unique example in that the “Country” in question is France, not New England, but the supernatural phenomena, Dying Town, and mysterious foggy woods allow Villefranche to translate pretty well into a location like these.
• Lunacy: In "Moonstruck" a certain kind of full moon that comes out once a year causes strange events in town, making everyone more violent and causing interference with the town energy. It's unclear whether they are related, but during that full moon, Hermann sees and talks with Camille, either a hallucination or her ghost.
• Market-Based Title: The original French title of the show is translated to "White Zone", translated to "Black Spot", as they are the word for a zone without or poor telephone reception. In Brazil, since a word for that doesn't exist, the show was given the title of "Labirinto Verde" ("Green Labyrinth").
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Tons of strange occurences in Villefranche look unnatural, but might just as well have a mundane explanation (though this doesn't deter the locals from forming myths around the idea of the forest being a thinking entity) - the strange behavior of the crows, the antlered man in the forests, the illusions in the cave, the almost invisible (yet definitely corporeal) presence in the forest that drags unsuspecting people away. The show crosses the line into "definitely magic"-territory when the antlered man resurrects a mortally wounded Laurène, with her having fully recovered from three potentially fatal bullet wounds within the space of four months.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Gaspard betrays Gerald, siding with Bertrand in the season 2 finale, giving him a gun with no ammo. When Gerald calls him out on this, he just says that he is tired of being treated like a dog and that Gerald is bad at Human Resources that feeling seems to reverberate with all of the other underlings.
• Neat Freak: Implied with Franck Sirani, who brings out a full bottle of hand sanitizer, admittedly after running his hands through a disgusting film on the table of his hotel room.
• Parental Sexuality Squick: Brought to a disturbing height in "No More Walks in The Woods", where a boy kills another one in the woods after having found him having sex with his mom.
• Red Herring: In "No More Walks in The Woods", the policemen find an odd figure in the background of the footage, implied to be the antlered being that had been priorly shown. While that is a mysterious moment, it ends up being unrelated to the case.
• The Sociopath: Gerald. He thinks nothing of having his own granddaughter, Marion, murdered to cover up his crookedness, uses threats, intimidation and lies to get what he wants, displays no further emotion beyond spite and smugness, shows apathy towards his son’s grief and rage, and attempts to murder said son for defying him and not living up to his standards.
• Title Drop: In the first episode, Laurène calls the city a "Black Spot" to Siriani.
• Villainous Breakdown: A subdued example in the Season 2 finale with Gerald. After he is outwitted by his own son, whom he abused for the majority of his life, and backstabbed by his henchman, he can only stand in place fuming silently in disbelief before Bertrand shoots him in the leg. Transitions to Laughing Mad when he realizes he is about to meet his end in the jaws of a hungry wolf.
• Would Not Hurt A Child: In the end of "A Wolf's Dream", the kidnapper can't bring himself to kill the baby of the man he blames for the death of his wife and children, which lets Laurène rescue the baby.
• Wham Shot:
  • "The Secret Behind the Window", the shot of Laurène finding Marion's body ritualistically posed on an altar at a bog, confirming Marion had been dead all along.
  • The final episode of season one has two:
    • A figure approaches and kills Laurène, it's then revealed to be Camille.
    • The mysterious antlered figure returns and resurrects a dead Laurène using plants in the woods.
  • "Moonstruck", the part of the climax that focuses on Sabine, showing her sitting side by side with Cernunnos.
• Wham Episode: Season 2 finale "The Shadow and the Preys" reveals the antlered being in the woods is Sylvain, a boy that was kidnapped together with Laurène in 1996. Not only that, but Laurène is also her sister. Unrelated to that, Siriani finds Delphine Garnier murdered in the car they were going to use to leave town, Bertrand shoots his father and leaves him to die in the forest at the jaws of a wolf, and the Children of Arduinna counterattack the quarry by blowing it up.

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