Black Snow Season 2 review: Cormack is back

The year is 2003, and Zoe Jacobs (Jana McKinnon) is not enjoying her 21st. No sooner have the fireworks started (to the tune of Where’s Your Head At by Basement Jaxx, because 2003) than she’s hit the road and vanished into darkness. Looks like another cold case for Queensland’s top dirt-digging detective, James Cormack (Travis Fimmel) – or it would be, if he wasn’t suspended for bashing a suspect.

Having him off the job turns out to be handy, because it means he’s in a grumpy mood even before he comes home to find his dad Tommy (Nicolas Hope) on his couch. It’s not a happy reunion: for starters Tommy killed Cormack’s mother (and spent a long time in prison for it), and his boozy ways led to a lot of things he’ll never be forgiven for.

He’s here not to mend old wounds, but to ask for help. It seems Cormack’s long-vanished younger brother is in trouble.

‘They’ll kill him if they find him,’ Tommy says.

Cormack’s answer involves throwing a bottle at him. If you think that’s the end of things, you might want to leave the investigative work to Cormack.

Watch the Black Snow Season 2 trailer.

Black Snow: back

Cormack has his job back in the next scene, which does seem a bit abrupt but it sets up regular sessions with a shrink and they’re always handy in a police drama. Up north, Zoe’s backpack has been found in the abandoned community radio station where she used to work.

Looks like Cormack’s got two mysteries to solve.

There are technically three storylines going on in this season of Black Snow (the actual series is titled Black Snow: Jack of Clubs, but the subtitle’s been dropped from the press materials). In the present day, Cormack is mostly spending time with constable Samara (Sam) Kahlil (Megan Smart) going through evidence and throwing out theories.

The evidence at the time suggested Zoe made it at least as far as Brisbane before vanishing; with her backpack still in town, Cormack has different ideas.

He’s also technically looking for his younger brother, but that’s a subplot largely kept on the backburner – you might want to keep your fingers crossed for a third season, as there’s clearly a lot going on with the Cormack family. Still, it does provide a bit of variety (and a chance for Fimmel to lurk around some Brisbane laneways), and it’s always nice to watch a local series with the confidence that it’ll be asked back for another season.

Black Snow: meat

The real meat, at least early on, is in the flashbacks to 2003. Zoe’s life hanging out with the young Sam Kahlil (Alana Mansour) – that’s right, the cop investigating her disappearance now was her best friend back then – and fellow radio DJ Cody (Nicholas Bakopoulos-Cooke) all seems relaxed at first, what with going to Iraq War protests and wearing Magic Dirt T-shirts. But soon the dark side makes itself known.

There are work dramas and conflict at home, turmoil amongst her friends, a drug-peddling uncle, and a mysterious new love interest who has ‘murder suspect’ written all over him – which everyone after her disappearance picked up on, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it (or does it?). As Zoe’s life starts to fall apart, it doesn’t take long for the pieces of a solid whodunnit to fall into place.

Australia’s served up its fair share of regional mysteries in recent years, and most of the virtues here are par for the course. The story doesn’t drag its heels, there’s a strong supporting cast (including Dan Spielman and Kat Stewart), and plenty of nice shots of the Glass House mountains where much of the series was filmed. But the big strength of Black Snow is that it knows what it’s got in Fimmel.

Since he broke out as Ragnar Lothbrok in Vikings, the Victorian-born actor’s become a striking performer who can do a lot with a little, at his best with characters who seem to be working at an angle to where the story’s heading. Here he underplays his quirks, making Cormack a detective who’s both deeply interested in the people around him and doggedly following tangents he’s come up with on his own.

‘I don’t envy you,’ Sam says to him early on, ‘picking the scabs of other people’s trauma.’

‘If we can give some answers to Zoe’s family, maybe finally they can move on,’ he replies, in the closest the series gets to a mission statement. ‘And besides, sometimes it feels good to pick scabs.’

Guess that’s as good a reason to solve mysteries as any.

Black Snow – Season 2 premieres on 1 January 2025 on Stan, with new episodes weekly

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