Van Der Valk Season 4 Episode 4 Review: Hope in Amsterdam: Part 2

We have a lot of potential suspects coming into Van Der Valk Season 4 Episode 4, “Hope in Amsterdam: Part 2.” By the end of the episode, we can throw them all out.

At first, suspicions again rise against Gerda’s boyfriend, Jesse. But once we actually see Cobie, going by “Caged Bird” online, we learn more about her past, including her father Marcus, and both Jesse and his mother, a woman named Anki.

Anki seems worryingly invested in Marcus for a man who is just the father of someone her child cared for. By the end of the episode, that turns out to be a full obsession. She’s the one who has driven Cobie into hiding and since told her not to return.

Once chased down by the team, who know that she killed those who would have drawn Cobie back, she holds the girl at gunpoint. Thankfully, Piet is a good shot. Anki is taken in with a wounded hand and Cobie is reunited with her father at last.

The truth about Hendrik also comes to the surface. He has throat cancer, a serious but at this moment survivable diagnosis. The rest of the team seems even more shaken than he is by the news but appear resolved to a positive outlook at the end of the hour.

Nearly every crime or police drama devotes at least some time each episode to chasing red herrings, but in most we also get the true culprit sometime along with all the false ones, giving us a chance to guess from multiple theories early on.

Here, we don’t even meet Anki until well into the second half of this plot. That gives us limited time to know her, see her erratic behavior, question what she’s really up to, and learn that it’s even more sinister than we might have imagined.

There is plenty of evidence that she’s a deeply disturbed individual. Less fleshed out are her motives for killing both Gerda and “Meatball”, who she mows down with her car. They were involved with encouraging Cobie’s return, but the explanation is loose.

The overall effect is less “plot twist” and “plot upheaval”, but the final scenes play out as well as could be hoped, rife with tension and the real possibility that Cobie could be killed moments before escaping her terrifying circumstances.

I’m also a little surprised to see the plot of Hendrik’s diagnosis progress midway through the season, and especially with such emotional impact. Piet both rarely expresses deep feeling and has a very casual relationship with Hendrik, so his initial reaction is moving.

Can we be comforted by his conviction that his type of cancer isn’t as serious as he could be? Possibly. There’s a chance that getting the news out now is a positive thing and we’ll get to find out that initial treatments are working by season’s end.

On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that both characters and audience are being set up to have the rug pulled out from under us. Thankfully, unless there’s a major time jump, that would be unlikely to play out in the last two episodes of the season.

Though there have been various personal dramas this season, they’ve mostly been separate from the cases. Chances are that will change in these last two episodes. Maybe we’ll get lucky enough to only deal with one set of life-or-death stakes at a time.

 

What did you think of this episode of Van Der Valk? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Van Der Valk airs Sundays at 10/9c on PBS.

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