'Zodiaque' Season 3 Reviews

(Full of spoilers, obviously!)

I have mixed feelings about Season 3. While I’d love to believe the writers will deliver another gripping plot, the way Season 2 ended leaves me with serious doubts.

Let’s go back to the final episode of season 2, widely regarded as the most twist-filled, melodramatic and divisive endings in the entire series. It’s a classic “everything explodes at once” French TV finale. Just to recap: season 2 begins with Mathias on trial for his crimes as “Le Zodiaque.” A new killer emerges, “Le Maître du Zodiaque”, who starts committing murders with the same signature. In the final episode, it turns out that Le Maître is Eva Trammel, a gendarmerie captain whom Keller and Esther had been helping to catch the killer. As if it wasn’t enough we are told Eva Trammel was the real Esther, the daughter of Grâce Delaître and Gabriel Saint-André and twin sister of Mathias, who as a 7-year-old child, was abducted and sexually abused by the neurologically programmed students of the Daguerre Institute. She suffered severe trauma and was later “erased”. This horrific experience is what drove her to become “Le Maître du Zodiaque”, seeking revenge on everyone connected to the Saint-André family and the institute.

The season 2 finale had pros and cons. The good side was an explanation of the physical discrepancy between a petite, blonde Esther and a tall, dark-haired Mathias. Eva Trammel played by a tall, dark-haired Natacha Lindinger was certainly more reliable as Mathias’ twin sister. The bad (or even terrible) side was the explanation that after kidnapping of Esther Grâce was so overwhelmed with pain that when Gabriel brought her the two-year daughter of Cécile Saint-André and Alexis Daguerre, who has just lost her mother in a tragic car accident, she accepted her as her daughter Esther. An unnamed, two-year old girl who conveniently no one in the family knows about ... seriously?! This is so completely unreliable that I cannot believe the producers agreed to such an ending.

Therefore, the Esther we followed in Season 1 (played by Claire Keim) was not the biological twin of Mathias. She was the replacement child. The real biological twin (the one abducted) grew up to become Eva Trammel, who later became “Le Maître du Zodiaque” and sought revenge. This twist is one of the weakest parts of Season 2. The idea that a mother would simply accept a completely different child as her own (especially after losing her biological daughter) without anyone noticing or questioning it for years stretches credibility quite a lot.

In fact, for years I was hoping for Zodiaque’s Season 3 exactly because I thought the creators would explain themselves somehow from this mess of ending they prepared for Season 2. But with no Esther in season 3, they will get away with it. Lack of Claire Keim is another major blow to the series. Frankly speaking, I don’t know what the Franck Ollivier and Malina Detcheva will do to fulfil this hole. It was she who enchanted the viewers and was driving the plot all the time with her search for clues, personal struggles and of course, her romance with commissioner Keller. Erika Sainte playing Garance Lombardi, a new female lead, has a lot to live up to after her predecessor; let’s hope she rises to the challenge.

I hope I’m wrong, but given that season 2 ended in such an overly complicated and far-fetched way, there’s a high risk that season 3 will be of a similar standard. Well, we’ll see on 18 June. I’ll be posting updates on the new episodes as they air, so if, like me, you’re a Zodiaque fanatic, feel free to follow me.