1.1 "Camille"
We open on a school bus trip. A red-haired girl called Camille is looking listlessly out the window and listening to music. Her teacher hands her a test paper which she looks at disinterestedly. A few moments later the bus plunges over the side of a bridge. The titles tell us it is now "present day", and we focus on a collection of butterflies under glass. The case begins shaking as one of the insects breaks free and shatters the glass, flying off into the night sky. An old man sleeps in an untidy house and is suddenly woken by a knocking at his door.
The scene switches to Camille, the schoolgirl from the bus accident, as she clambers over a guardrail, seemingly from over the cliff and walks towards the village that is her home. In a local bar a man pays a woman much younger than he, and his daughter, outside in a car with her boyfriend watches, disgusted. Her name is Lena, and it's pretty obvious what her father has just paid for. The man then goes to attend a grief councilling meeting, where the parents of all the children killed in the bus accident are discussing a memorial which is to be erected on the fourth anniversary of the tragedy. One of the women, Sandrine, tells the group she is pregnant again, and seems happy.
All this time, Camille is still walking home, and as she makes her way there the lights go on and off as if there are intermittent power failures in the village. When she gets home, her mother calls to her, expecting Lena, who we now see is her sister. She is amazed, shocked, delighted and disbelieving to find her daugher, Camille, dead now these four years, eating a sandwich in the kitchen and believing she has only just that morning deaprted on the bus. She knows nothing of the accident, telling her mother she awoke on the side of a hill and has no idea how she got there.
Fearing she is perhaps going mad, Claire calls her husband to come home. Well, she doesn't quite. She calls Pierre, who is the one chairing the meeting, and then when she gets no answer from him she calls the man we saw paying the young girl, whose name is Jerome, and he hurries home, amazed to find his dead daughter taking a bath in her house. Satisfied that she is not losing her mind, Claire wonders what they are to do, and how they can explain this? How can it be happening?
Cut to Julie, a young doctor who is called in the middle of the night to one of her patients, a Mr. Costa. He says it's urgent. The camera focusses on a picture of a young woman and a voice asks "Who were you calling?" As Julie goes to leave a strange, wild-eyed young man enters and asks her if the door code has changed, to which she says no. She leaves and he goes up the staircase to her apartment, knocking but getting no answer. A neighbour tells him the occupant has just left, and he asks is it Adele but the woman says no, Julie. He looks surprised.
Julie meanwhile attends to Mr. Costa, and as she finishes up hears someone in the kitchen, but he says he is alone. When she is gone we see that sitting in the kitchen is the woman in the photograph, looking as if she has just stepped out of the picture this moment, or just finished posing for it. On the way home, Julie encounters a young boy at the bus stop, who watches her as she gets on the bus and then follows her. The strange young man goes to the local bar, The Lake Pub, looking for Adele but is told she does not work there; she now works in the multimedia library. Lena, who is drinking at the bar, offers to show him where she lives.
Pierre turns up at Camille's house and Claire says that her daughter has come back, just as he said she would: it's a miracle. It's clear Pierre is some sort of religious person; not a priest, but a man of deep faith who believes everything happens for a reason. Camille does not trust him when she sees him; she does not know him, and the closeness of the man to her mother and her rather cold detachment from her father bothers her. She does not realise that it's been four years and things have changed in her family.
The little boy gets off at the same stop as Julie but can't get into her building; she is so tired she fails to even see him as she goes in. It's only later, when she looks out of the window she sees him standing in the street, looking up at her. There's a knock on her door, and somehow he's outside. She asks who he is, is he lost, but he won't say a word. When her nosy neighbour comes out and sees the boy Julie quickly names him Victor, so as to dispel any notions the woman might have. The neighbour, Mrs. Payet, tells Julie that someone was here looking for Adele, and goes back into her own apartment, while the boy makes himself at home.
Pierre compares Camille's return to the Resurrection of Christ, but Jerome is not a believer and is not impressed. It's clear now that Pierre is with Claire, and her ex-husband resents both his interest in his wife and also his beliefs, and the way Claire clings to them. However Pierre agrees that Camille needs her family --- the family she thinks she left behind only this morning --- and leaves. When the young man reaches Adele's house he tries to get in but she goes crazy, banging on the door from inside and refusing to open it, screaming "Leave me alone!" Her daughter comes down the stairs to see what is wrong, and the young man, realising he won't get in or perhaps hearing the little girl walks away.
Julie continues to try to get information out of the boy but nothing doing. She agrees to allow him to stay with her for now. In the Lake Pub, the girl who Jerome had paid at the beginning, whose name is Lucy, walks home and goes via an underpass which will figure more in the story as the series progresses. Here she is attacked by a knife-wielding man, who stabs her repeatedly and leaves her for dead. Lena returns home but climbs in her window as she is late, and is startled to hear tapping on her bedroom wall, coming from the opposite room, Camille's room, then terrified as her responding tap is answered! She stares in horror as her bedroom door opens and then her dead sister, her twin, stands in front of her. She breaks down, screaming hysterically as her parents rush upstairs, too late to explain things to her.
Scene changes to old Mr. Costa's house, and we see him pouring lighter fluid over photographs and setting them on fire, as the woman in the picture, bound and gagged, watches in horror from the kitchen. The flames leap up. The fire brigade, attending later, are told by the police that Mr. Costa is gone and the fire looks like arson, but nobody else was in the building when it burned down. The police captain, arriving home, finds Adele in shock, and she tells him it has started again. The young man who had tried to see her finds his grave, and we see his name is Simon Delaitre. Workers at the dam are concerned about the level of the water in the reservoir; it's dropping and showing no signs of stopping. They are even more concerned when they see an old man standing on the edge of the dam. Before they can stop him, Mr. Costa has jumped.
As the first episode comes to a conclusion, we see Camille, four years prior, the day of the accident. Her sister, Lena, is sick, and so is not going on the trip. Camille sulks that she does not want to go either, but her parents say they have paid a lot of money for it and she is going. Then we see that Lena is only feigning sickness in order to have her end away with a local boy, Frederic. As they begin to make love, Camille somehow senses it and runs to the front of the bus, saying she must get off. Just as she does, the little boy, Victor, appears in the middle of the road. Fade to black.
QUESTIONS?
"The Returned" is a series of questions. The first and most obvious is how and why Camille has come back from the dead. Is it possible that she is not dead? Could she have lain on the side of a mountain in a coma for four years and only now woke up, with no knowledge of the passage of time? But if so, why does she look not one day older? What about Simon? Is he dead too? He has seen his own grave, but perhaps that was erected in his absence, and people thought he was dead? What is his connection to Adele?
Why does Camille feel the strong connection with Lena? Is it just a sister thing, a result of their being twins, or is it more? Who is the little boy known as Victor, and where did he come from? Why has he latched on to Julie? Who is the woman who appeared in Mr. Costa's house and why did he set it on fire? Who killed Lucy in the tunnel? What connection has that to the story?
This series will answer some questions, but others will not be so easily disposed of.
CONNECTIONS
There is a definite link now between Adele and Simon, and the police captain appears to factor into that also. Whose child is the little girl?
Other relationships will begin to be clarified in the next few episodes, as everything eventually ties together in one huge mysterious tapestry.
Lena must feel a heavy burden of guilt, knowing that had she not faked illness in order to see her boyfriend that morning she would also be dead; whether she would have come back or not is debatable. So far, it seems Camille is the only one of the children to return. But Lena must feel guilty for being alive while her sister is, well, not quite.