Another Friendship Destroyed By The E.U.

A new season of Borgen is now underway, but Danish Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is still having to confront the ways in which her job impinges on her relationships. In last week's season premiere, she reluctantly finalized her divorce from her husband Philip (Mikkael Birkkjær). Then the latest episode forced her to contemplate a second divorce -- this one from one of her oldest friends.

The way Birgitte and Bent Sejrø (Lars Knutzon) have drifted apart has paralleled the way her marriage deteriorated, and is...kind of almost as heartbreaking. Birgitte's ascension to Prime Minister is so unexpected that no one has even thought about a road map for how that would work if it happened. At first, Birgitte is tentative at the office in respects that are congruent with her having been socialized as a woman -- for instance, collaborative instincts that served her well when she was an MP make her seem weak as PM. Bent is forced to tell her in so many words that when she has other party members in to meet in her office, she needs to sit at the head of the table to reinforce her authority. And, at home, Philip gives her similar pieces of advice gleaned from his experience as a CEO. Birgitte's reputation in the press is as "the nice girl"; she needs help to reinvent herself as a hard-assed head of state. Yet, when Birgitte is forced to make decisions that run counter to Philip's or Bent's interests -- generally for political reasons that don't make her terribly happy either -- it's hard for both dudes to understand that she learned it from watching them.

At the end of the show's first season, Birgitte was forced, due to a series of extremely shitty political moves on the parts of others, to remove Bent from his position as her Finance Minister -- sacrificing him for the sake of her government (or, to a cynic, for the sake of her ambition). So in the second season, which takes place many months later, relations between Birgitte and Bent are still tense. Bent is still the Moderates' Deputy Leader, Birgitte's second-in-command, so even though it's clear to everyone that things have changed between them on a personal level, he's still trying to serve her and her government by giving her what he feels is valuable counsel. Meanwhile, Birgitte clearly regrets having fired Bent, and expresses her remorse and shame by trying to avoid him.

So when the latest episode finds Birgitte needing to figure out which of her MPs she's going to send to Brussels to be Denmark's new E.U. commissioner, there are a couple of good reasons for Bent to make the shortlist. One is that someone of his experience and stature will be likely to get a fancier portfolio and bolster Denmark's standing in the organization. Another is that, while it is technically a promotion and an honour and all of that, it's also a way for her to get Bent out of her sight on a day to day basis (which will also let her cultivate her relationship with Jens Jacob Tychsen's Jacob Kruse, Bent's presumptive replacement as Deputy Leader).

But even before the possibility of Bent's going to Brussels is raised as a possibility, and in the midst of their cooled-off period, he's still pushing Birgitte to be the best PM she can be. He challenges her to surround herself not with people who will blindly sign off on her tougher decisions (what he characterizes as her escalating the war in Afghanistan, for instance, in the previous episode). And when her response to his stopping by her office is to remind him, tightly, that he needs to make an appointment (something that would have been unthinkable at this point last season), he visits her at home to ask why, even though he knows why she fired him from Finance, it has meant that they can't be friends anymore. Here is a man with the emotional maturity to raise the issue, and the sense not to do so at the office. This is exactly the sort of person Birgitte should keep close -- and yet the viewer understands why she's bristling at him, too. It's a complex relationship not seen much in pop culture: a mentorship that's not patronizing, and a male/female friendship completely bereft (in a good way!) of any sexual tension. And it's precisely because their platonic friendship is so deep that their clashes feel like a replay of her breakup with Philip: as much as she loves and needs Bent, the exigencies of her office are preventing her from relating to him the way she used to.

Anyway, once the rumour of Bent's imminent appointment is raised, everything goes to hell: Bent refuses the job. Then Bent's wife Kirsten (Gitte Siem Christensen) personally asks Birgitte not to offer him the job, because she's been so pleased with the way he's relaxed since leaving Finance. Then when he hears who Birgitte does want to send (Petrine Agger's Pernille Madsen), he changes his mind back, and Birgitte angrily lets him take it in a funny/sad scene with exasperation on both sides. It seems like the door is closed on both the job and this friendship until Bent is about to give a post-announcement speech and collapses with a cerebral embolism -- and not his first, apparently, which the Expres claims Birgitte knew. Turns out Kirsten told Kruse all about her concerns for Bent's health and what more stress might do to him, and Kruse told her he'd explain it to Birgitte, but instead of doing that, he kept it to himself, rolled the dice that he might actually endanger his colleague's health, and then, once he had, leaked the whole thing to the press.

So: Kruse is going to Brussels instead, Birgitte having decided it's more important to exile him than to angle for Denmark to get a good portfolio (and sure enough, he gets Multilingualism, a post that's already been denigrated in the episode). And Bent lies unconscious at the hospital -- or so it seems, until Birgitte visits and apologizes for all the events that put him there, and he seems to be sufficiently aware of her to squeeze her hand. Though no one would have wished for something like this to be what restored Birgitte and Bent's friendship, it is reassuring to see that even though Birgitte may now be mostly pragmatic Prime Minister, she's still a person in all the most important respects.