Going into this I had seen it get relatively good reviews, with emphasis on "relatively", from critics. By that, I mean that most episodes of Beck tend to get lower than 3/5, while this one had been rated nothing under 3 by critics, even having 4/5 on one website. Though it shouldn't have been surprising, I was surprised by how bad I thought this was, considering the relative critical praise which I have rarely seen for a Beck episode.
First of all, the expected; the dialogue is truly so-and-so. I was first going to say that it's expected because it's always been that way in Beck, but that would be untrue, since the first few seasons of the show if anything had good dialogue as one of the subtle selling points. It's rather expected because the last maybe 3 seasons have felt AI-generated in dialogue, and this one really topped it. It's heavily expository, humorless and only meant to serve the plot, more or less giving up on the possibility that the audience might in any way at all actually take interest in any of the characters. The dialogue that is not expository is, first of all rare if not near extinct, but also uninteresting, and unfortunately often meaningless.
Valter Skarsgård was praised for his acting as Vilhelm, which... I can't say I agree with. He's not terrible, but he's played roughly the same character in everything I've seen him in so far, and I think his acting lacks personality. That's not to say he has to be some Ernst-Hugo Järegård in eccentricities, but there's nothing special or charismatic about his portrayal in a way that's gonna help this show survive if he were to replace Peter Haber. I also have a hard time getting past the fact that Vilhelm was supposed to be only half Swedish and had black hair and tanned skin in the early episodes, only to now have blonde hair, pasty skin and green eyes. Could it be because he's a Skarsgård...
The story isn't bad but is somewhat ruined by the premise of Beck itself; it would've benefitted from getting more time to develop, and one episode is hardly enough for that. They could've made a whole 4-episode miniseries just about them and it would've been better. One critic mentioned garnering sympathy for the perpetrators, which isn't unreasonable, but I don't get how one could do that considering the little time you get to follow them. I thought they gave more of a "one-shot villain in american 70s tv show"-impression.
The last minutes were unexpected but it didn't shock me. "Oh so that just happened". I guess one could see a bunch of different interpretations of that but I don't really get the point of putting it in. Did they just... run out of ideas? The conversation between Martin and Vilhelm near the end is in my opinion an example of the aforementioned non-expository but still bad dialogue in this show. It's awkward and feels forced.
As a final verdict, I immediately thought "uninspired" would be the right word for this, but bland works pretty well too. They are going for a "dark" direction with Beck, but they're doing so in a way that, at least in my opinion, makes it uninteresting. Mikael Persbrandt wanted a hollywood career, Ingvar Hirdwall committed suicide, and Peter Haber is getting old. The original components that made this show likeable are pretty much gone.