Detective Forst follows the titular detective investigating the mystery behind serial murders even as he’s suspended due to his maverick approach. The series is currently streaming on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Detective Forst investigates a grisly mountaintop murder but his maverick approach ends up getting him booted off the case.
Meanwhile, a nosy journalist, Olga Szrebka, becomes his unlikely partner as he continues the investigation on his own.
A second body is found; the victim was killed in the same way as the previous one.
Then a third one is found, and when Forst pushes his luck, he gets suspended for three months by his superior, Chief Edmund Osica.
The identity of the third one is revealed and it’s found that the decapitated body belongs to Minister Rozwadowski’s son Maks.
Olga hands a map that Professor Chalimoniuk, the first victim, had with him. The map leads him to Slovakia, where he reunites with his former work partner and flame, Frantiska.
He gets her help breaking into a highly guarded villa of a very old, powerful man, Leon Lowotarski. They escape after they’re beaten and caged, but Frana ends up dead.
Back at Zakopane, Forst finally learns the identity of the serial killer, who’s a familiar face from his past. He and Olga flee a burning building and she is hospitalized.
Forst is suspected of being the serial killer and as he hunts Iwo, he’s hunted by the police. Iwo later kidnaps Agat, Chief Osica’s daughter, and Forst goes to rescue her.
He fails to save her, and Staszek, who both die at the hands of Iwo Elijah. The two fight but a gravely injured Iwo manages to flee the authorities, with the help of Olga.
Wiktor is left with all the signs pointing to him being the serial killer, as Detective Forst season 1 ends.
Ending explained:
Who is the serial killer?
The serial killer is Iwo Elijah, who grew up together with Wiktor in the orphanage headed by Halina Sznajderman. Halina groomed him to seek vengeance for her.
She molded him through severe torment and abuse. Forsts eventually adopted Wiktor while Iwo remained, as Forsts rejected him after learning that he was a petty thief.
He wasn’t though, and the case that branded him with the label involved Wiktor, who was actually the guilty party, but as usual, Iwo took the blame for it and went on to pay the consequences.
As a grownup, Iwo is Gjord, the seemingly ordinary husband of Regional Prosecutor, Dominika Waldrys-Hansen.
He has two daughters with her and is frequently away for work purposes, which are real trips he takes to kill people.
Iwo and Wiktor were sworn brothers during their childhood but Iwo took the blame for any wrongdoings that Wiktor committed. He would even force him to take the blame.
As a result, Iwo would be beaten senselessly at the orders of Halina. His back would come to be rife with horrific scars from all the lashings.
Wiktor would later get adopted and leave Iwo alone at the orphanage, which would further destroy his psyche and birth in him a searing desire for revenge on Wiktor.
He saw Wiktor going away as a betrayal of their blood brotherhood, but that only he remained committed to, taking all the suffering for himself as Wiktor remained unpunished.
Who is Halina Sznajderman?
Halina Sznajderman serves as one of the major antagonists in Detective Forst. Her story goes decades back, even before her birth.
After the Second World War, some former Nazis subjected people to torture and hung them on ropes.
This organized group of collaborators, all Nazis, was headed by the one-eyed devil, Leon Lowotarski.
They ran a top-secret brothel in the Tatra mountains, and Lowotarski still runs it at this age, having lived the longest out of all collaborators.
They would kill the parents and later, their daughters would all go missing, never to return except for one, who did.
One of their victims was a woman named Mirosława, who returned to Zakopane, nine months pregnant, and delivered the baby in a church.
Snapped out of her mind, she would drag her baby through the streets, mumbling about a one-eyed devil — Lowotarski, who impregnated her.
Years later, she died and her daughter grew up to be Halina Sznajderman, who ran an orphanage and later, headed the Mountain Remembrance Foundation.
She seeks revenge against Lowotarski and his collaborators. To achieve that, she groomed Iwo through abuse, brainwashing him and making him her puppet for vengeance.
Is Iwo caught?
However, Halina was wrong in thinking she had control over Iwo Elijah, as he was his own person now and wished to complete his own revenge against Detective Forst.
Elijah takes her revenge and makes it his own in many ways.
He goes after the descendants of the collaborators, killing them one by one and leaving a coin lodged in their throats, something that was not a part of Halina’s plan.
They were all Aureus coins, similar to the one Halina used to wear as her locket, the one that Iwo took so much suffering for.
Before killing Lowotarski, he learns that Halina is his daughter, and so later he kills her too. Forst catches up to him eventually but the police become suspicious of him.
Soon, he becomes the prime suspect in the serial killings.
To prove his innocence, he needs to get to Iwo soon and matters only become more urgent when Iwo kidnaps Chief Osica’s daughter, Agata.
She is killed by Iwo, and so is Staszek, before Detective Forst can catch up to him. The two fight, and are left injured.
However, when the police arrive, Iwo is nowhere to be seen. Forst suspects he might be out for Olga’s life.
Forst runs to save Olga, who he had kept at his colleague Nina’s house. He reaches to see a bloodied coin, a dead Nina, but no Olga.
Before Detective Forst rolls the credits, Olga is seen driving away, with a gravely injured but conscious Iwo Elijah.
It is unclear if she killed Nina or Iwo, as well as the reason behind her actions.
What happens to Detective Forst?
Wiktor, meanwhile, is now almost unable to escape the grasp of the law. He was at the orphanage where Osica’s dead daughter and dead Staszek were found.
Before this, he was the prime suspect of being the Beast of Giewont.
He was later declared the serial killer in a press conference by Dominika, who learned that her husband is a killer and yet, to protect her family’s happiness and stability, she turned to obstruct the truth.
Now that he’s also present at Nina’s house where she lies dead and there is a bloodied coin there, Detective Forst is going to be blamed for it all, just as Iwo wanted.
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