Long-running crime dramas do not often risk this much so late in the game.
Five seasons in, The Sommerdahl Murders has reached the point where most detective series either settle into habit or try to surprise themselves. This fifth season, to its credit, decides not to coast.
Where once each pair of episodes functioned as a distinct short story with only the loosest of connections to what came before, the eight instalments that make up this fifth series operate as a single, sustained narrative. There are still bodies, suspects, and interviews, but the familiar case-of-the-week machinery now feeds into something larger: a conspiracy that has reached the detective unit itself.
The action resumes half a year on from the drugs bust that closed the previous run, with Josefine Sundby behind bars and her partner Dan Sommerdahl refusing to accept the case as closed. His refusal to let go has become a corrosive force within the small Helsingør police department.
Junior officers who bent the rules to secure the original conviction are afraid of being exposed. A new commanding officer, with a narcotics background, has been brought in to keep a lid on things. Meanwhile, those trying to rebuild the local criminal underworld after Otto’s arrest have begun their own campaign to neutralise Sommerdahl before he neutralises them.
The Sommerdahl Murders Season 5 Review: Four Investigations, One Serialised Mystery
The four murder investigations are not separate detours but pieces of the same story, each revealing a different part of a conspiracy closing in around Sommerdahl and the department. The fairground stallholder cut down mid-shift, in circumstances that immediately raise the question of mistaken identity, leads the detectives to Arne Lind, a small-time bookmaker and fairground organiser whose operations extend well beyond running the dodgems.
The fashion-week case, with a male model washed up on the beach, shows how quickly glamour curdles into leverage.
A Thai boxing gym stabbing is the season’s nastiest little puzzle: a butterfly-shaped blood pattern, a circle of friends all lying in step, and a murder that turns on the price of loyalty. Finally, the waterfront killing that brings the season to a climax detonates everything the audience thought they knew about where the series was heading.
This is not to say the individual mysteries have been neglected. The gym investigation, in particular, is a masterclass in misdirection. It is a closed-circle puzzle in which every witness has a different version of the truth and none of them quite add up. The writing team, led by Lolita Bellstar and Christine Exner, keeps the audience guessing without making the twists feel arbitrary. The difference this time is that the solution is not the whole reward. The whodunit is secondary to the question of what the investigation will cost the people conducting it, and who within the department might be pulling the strings.
Standout Performances and New Threats in Helsingør
As Dan Sommerdahl, Peter Mygind gives his strongest performance in the series. The easy-going, slightly dishevelled detective of previous runs is still visible in the quieter moments, but a harder, more driven man has taken over. He bullies witnesses, clashes with his superiors, and repeatedly disregards the advice of the only people still willing to stand by him. Mygind plays him as a man who can see the damage he is doing, even as he keeps walking straight into it. The affable copper of the early seasons has not vanished, but he is no longer in charge.
The supporting cast rise to match him. André Babikian’s Flemming Torp, once used largely as comic relief and a sounding board for Sommerdahl’s theories, is pulled into the season’s most uncomfortable questions about loyalty and duty, torn between professional responsibility, personal loyalty, and the complicated history he shares with both Sommerdahl and Marianne.
Laura Drasbæk, meanwhile, gets material worthy of her talents. Marianne finally feels like a character in her own right, not just the forensic expert or the person caught between Sommerdahl and Flemming, but the only member of the team with both the clarity and the courage to see what Sommerdahl’s crusade is doing to all of them.
The breakout performances, though, belong to the newcomers this series. Thit Aaberg is quietly terrifying as Astrid, Otto’s niece, who has taken over her uncle’s fishmonger’s shop and restocked it with a far more dangerous inventory. As her reluctant enforcer Arne, Caspar Phillipson creates one of the series’ most memorable villains, outwardly bumbling, inwardly ruthless, and entirely convincing at both.
A Bold Shift in Pacing and Tone
If the season has a flaw, it is structural. The fashion-week case, sitting between the fairground opener and the stronger gym episode, is the one that feels underfed. The victim is intriguing, and the setting should offer more, but the case wraps up before either has quite had room to breathe. It is the only point at which the writers’ ambition seems to outpace the available screen time, and even then it contains individual scenes, particularly those involving the victim’s quietly formidable mother, which stick in the memory long after the credits roll.
Helsingør itself remains a constant, though the way it is photographed has shifted. The broad, sunlit panoramas of earlier seasons are still there, but the camera now lingers longer on the edges of things: the alleyways behind the main streets, the shadowed corners of the police station, the stretches of beach where the tide comes in and washes evidence away. It feels less like postcard Helsingør now, and more like the town behind it: practical, lived-in, and full of places where secrets could sit unnoticed.
By the final episode, the old version of the show has been dismantled. Alliances are permanently redrawn and the comfortable procedural format that sustained four seasons is left in tatters. There is no reset button, no return to the way things were. The sixth season, already shot, will have to pick up the pieces of a show that has deliberately broken its own format.
Coming so quickly after the UK airing of season four, this fifth series of The Sommerdahl Murders feels like a genuine treat from Walter Presents. Long-running crime dramas do not often risk this much so late in the game. Fewer still manage it without losing sight of what made them work in the first place. Whether it can keep this up is another question. For now, the gamble has worked.
The Sommerdahl Murders, Season 5, is airing now on Walter Presents.
