We often wondered if Kim Bodnia’s Martin Rohde would make a dramatic return for the fourth and final installment of The Bridge. It would make sense to come back for one last final hurrah, and would have been a really interesting plot-point: how would Saga deal with Martin’s return when she’s now with Henrik Sabroe? And, of course, for fans of the show it would have been a real boon: we fell in love with flawed Martin as soon as he set foot onscreen, and his relationship with Saga was surely one of crime drama’s best during the past decade. Sadly, we now hear it’s definitely not happening.

While everyone else across Europe is enjoying series four, we here in the UK inexplicably have to wait for at least another couple of months for it come to these shores. (Honestly, why?) What we do now know is that Martin will definitely not be in it.

In the Expressen newspaper, Hans Rosenfeldt said [IF YOU DO READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE, BEWARE SERIES FOUR SPOILERS]:

Yes, it was in one of the flashback scenes that we had written a scene with Martin, but Kim did not want to do that. It would have been our little gift to the viewers. We know exactly when this flashback takes place and that’s when they’ve found the seven corpses in the lowered motorboat in season two. So Henrik and Martin would have had a scene in the flashback, but Kim did not want to come back. It was a scene that was a gift to the viewers and did not affect any storytelling, but when Kim did not want to be with us, we stretched it.

In the same article, Sofia Helin said:

It was not as simple as ‘Kim jumps off’, but it was a process that led to the decision that we had to go another way. It is clear that it was an exciting and intense collaboration came to an end, but I have also been able to use it a lot in character so it was very playable that Saga became so abandoned and alone.

So there we have it: we have officially seen the last of Martin Rohde. A great shame, but we’re excited to see series four nonetheless. Now come on BBC, do your part.

For all our news and reviews of The Bridge, go here