Une chance de trop

I loved this, I almost gave up on episode 2, but it was worth the watch. The twists and turns. Excellent show, highly recommend!

You get the idea about what kind of series 'No Second Chance' is going to be almost from the start: a woman is shot, her husband murdered, and his daughter kidnapped; yet almost at once the former is out of hospital trying to track down the latter, frequently in open defiance of the police. For good measure, everyone around her seems to be a suspect. It makes sense neither logically nor psychologically, and in consequence I found it hard to get involved with the story, which ultimately is proven to involve at least five perpetrators of at least semi-independent misdeeds. I quite liked the detective who reminded me of Mitterand; but for a serious French policier, watch 'Spiral' instead.

This decade, several good French-language series have been produced, with intense plots and twists, suspense and mystery moments, good character actors, etc. Having seen more than ten of them, it is natural that one becomes picky, starts to compare and find flaws or cliches not providing additional value. True, I really like the benchmark, how the events broke loose, pondering on and over the motives, but then, when a doctor took matters into her own hands, the number of unrealistic moments enhanced (e.g. regarding the police activities and attitudes), and later, particularly in the last episode, the amount of twists was too much, some scenes were not reasoned, and the solution how all was resolved reminded me more of the US series than European ones. As for the cast/characters, Alexandra Lamy as Alice Lambert and Hippolyte Girardot as Commandant Cyril Tessier outperform the others; besides, some characters were apparently included for political correctness (well, the source novel is written by an American anyway). All is all, not bad, but not in line with similar French series, e.g. Disparue, Engrenages, and others. And having seen the series, I find the title not too felicitous.

I enjoyed this program, but it didn't need to be 6 episodes. The drama was often overwrought. They could have easily gotten the entire plot done in four or less episodes.

Still it is worth the time to watch.

I just finished watching this on PBS Passport with the English subtitles that came with the video stream.

In my opinion there is no way you can predict the real motives and the ending. There are lots of twists to keep all the characters busy and keep you guessing. But you also begin to wonder why, like they add things just so there can be even more characters. The real story is revealed at the end.

Looking back, you should have a number of unanswered questions about the plot and the resolution for some of the characters. There appears to be no official consequences for their actions.

I don't consider the next few sentences a spoiler as I don't believe what I reveal has much if anything to do with the plot. There's a scene with 2 of the alleged bad guys, one male and one female. The female rolls up her shirt and her partner slugs her hard in the abdomen twice I believe and she falls down, but she's OK. That's it. So what purpose did the scene serve? I don't know.