Commander Raphaëlle Coste of the judicial police (Lola Dewaere), a woman with a deserved reputation as an impulsive, mercurial Cowboy Cop, is investigating the bizarre suicide by Self-Immolation of a wealthy man at the top of a parking garage. While looking into the case, she visits the Criminal Records office to look at a case file for a similar mystery suicide a couple years earlier, but is handed an additional file from a third case by a blonde archivist with an unusual gait.

Astrid Nielsen (Sara Mortensen) is a thirty-year-old woman on the autism spectrum. The daughter of a police detective, she has been fascinated with puzzles, including criminological ones, since she was a child and began sneaking looks at her father's case files; her father, since deceased, got her started at Criminal Records as an intern after she was forced out of public school. Astrid has noticed similarities between Coste's current case and a case file she'd previously handled. Unfortunately, she's soon arrested because of the knowledge she demonstrated of the case and the fact the previous victim happened to be her old psychiatrist, who had misdiagnosed her as schizophrenic, but after the mistaken identity is cleared up, she and Coste partner up to crack the case of a killer who leaves cattleya flowers at the scene of each crime.

The series was subtitled in English under the shortened title Astrid by Walter Presents and became available in the United States on PBS beginning November 2022. In the UK, the show has been broadcast on More4 under the title Astrid: Murder in Paris. Other European markets have retitled it Bright Minds. In 2025 a full-scale British remake was broadcast on Channel 4 under the title Patience.

Astrid contains examples of the following tropes:

• Affectionate Nickname: Raphaëlle goes by "Raph" with her fellow detectives Nicolas and Arthur. Astrid would be expected to fall into the same category, but still calls her "Commandant Coste" out of habit.
• All Girls Like Ponies: Astrid took part in equestrian summer camps for neurodivergent youths as a teenager, and still feels a strong bond to horses, which comes in handy when a prize racehorse is the murder victim of an episode in season 5. However, horses and stables also cause her to have epileptic fits, as they reawaken the buried trauma of the abuse she endured at one of these camps, and the accidental death of her abuser, one of the stablehands.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Played for laughs between Raph and Nicolas in season 3. After initially friend-zoning him, Raph realizes during the season that she does have feelings for him after all (partly prompted by her son finally cluing her in to Nicolas's feelings), but he's started dating their coworker Arthur's sister. In the season finale, she finally confesses that she's fallen for him... and he blows up at her for doing this now when he was on the verge of getting over her, she replies in kind, then they furiously kiss each other before he storms off while cussing her out.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: At first, Niels is this to Astrid, repeatedly forcing her out of her comfort zone, not to mention she is uncomfortable with children's impredictability to begin with. Eventually, once she figures out what boundaries to set and agrees to make him a part of her routine, she comes to appreciate his curiosity and first-degree bluntness.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: The victim in "The Arabian Nights" was burned alive using a spontaneously-igniting mixture of potassium permanganate and glycerine. Unfortunately, as any chemist will tell you, potassium permanganate has an incredibly strong purple color, making it impossible for the victim to have been doused with it without noticing.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: The crux of "Missing Link" is that the victim found a fossil bone that she thought supported the Ornithoscelida hypothesis, which states that theropods are more closely related to ornithischians than sauropods. The problem is, by the time the episode aired the hypothesis had largely been abandoned by the paleontological community due to problems with replicating the dataset that supported it; additionally, a single, isolated bone of unknown provenance wouldn't be enough evidence given that it would be hard to determine exactly what kind of animal it came from (for comparison, Ornithoscelida was revived following the discovery of the fairly complete Chilesaurus), meaning Dana Barrette's paper would've likely failed peer review and Raymond Stan didn't have to kill her at all.
• The Atoner: Brother Louis, the victim in "Memento Mori", became a monk after he killed a man who had raped his girlfriend, and when he was killed in revenge by the rapist's brother, spent his last moments forgiving his killer and trying to destroy the evidence against him.
• Bait-and-Switch: An episode opens with Paul and William attending a chess tournament. While chess is a common special interest for autistic people, which would seem to befit quiet, thoughtful Rail Enthusiast William, neurotypical Paul is actually the chess fan of the two.
• Balkan Bastard: The murderer in "The Fermi Paradox" turns out to be a fugitive Bosnian Serb war criminal.
• Beneath Notice: In "The Starling", the killer escapes from the scene by dressing as a forensic technician and leaving with the rest.
• Biological Parent Reunion: Astrid's mother Mathilde abandoned the family when her daughter was an infant out of fear she would harm her. She reappears in the first season and tries to reconnect with her, but Astrid initially has no interest in it, then, after Raph helps Mathilde meet her at a tangram tournament, chooses to think of Mathilde as a fellow tangram player rather than a parent.
• Bittersweet Ending: To "Invisible", the first season finale. Astrid's guardian Gaillard has been murdered, but it turns out that he had already begun proceedings to emancipate her, which then takes place. Astrid has also won the respect and sympathy of her previously mocking and uncomprehending colleagues at the archives.
• AB Negative: The victim in "Golden Blood" had a rare "Rhesus Null" blood type that made him a universal donor but only able to receive blood from other people with the same specific type.
• Booby Trap: One of the victims in "Madman's Sacrifice" is electrocuted by a booby-trapped keypad on a swimming-pool locker.
• Breaking Old Trends: The first three seasons use the standard No Badge? No Problem! trope of Cop and Scientist shows. However, shenanigans ensue in the second season finale that get Astrid fired, which is then overturned by the Prefect of Police in the next season premiere for her help closing a case that turned political, but only on condition that she pass police academy. She succeeds and is commissioned as a lieutenant in the judicial police in her own right, ending the show's use of the trope.
• Broken Pedestal: In "The Starling", Raph discovers that a TV conjurer that she was a fan of as a child is a paedophile and murderer.
• Brown Note: The murder weapon in "Fermata" is an infrasound generator, which causes one victim to die from a burst brain aneurysm, and another to die when his artificial heart valve jammed.
• Bullet Holes and Revelations: The climax of "In Custody". Raph is on the point of talking the hostage taker into releasing her hostage, when he sees an opening and attacks her. Raph rushes in, and there's a Gun Struggle that ends in a gunshot before the hostage taker is hauled away. Then it's revealed that the shot hit Raph. She's not badly hurt and returns to work with her arm in a sling.
• Cain and Abel: "The Ankou" involves two separate acts of fratricide in the same family.
• Calling Card: Alain Lamarck challenges Astrid and Raphaëlle by planting a Metro ticket from Lamarck-Caulaincourt station on the body of one of his victims.
• Catchphrase: Astrid often repeats herself.
  • "I will be late, one must not be late."
  • She also uses the phrase "body of corroborating evidence" at least once an episode; it fits with her MO of comparing thousands of clues from thousands of files in order to connect dots no one else would or could notice.
  • In early episodes, and occasionally later when under stress, she repeats "I am capable, I am qualified" to justify her involvement in investigations.
• Character Tic: Astrid has a lot:
  • Walking up or down stairs by putting first one foot and then the other on the same step.
  • Walking with her arms by her sides, holding her hands out at right angles by bending her wrists.
  • She also stims very often by wiggling her hands when she needs extra focus to think or interract with others.
  • She has a very specific diction, which makes her insist on consonants and always finish her sentences on the same neutral tone.
• Chastity Couple: Justified and played with. Astrid is very touch-averse and hates sharing her space, which she explains to Tetsuo very early in their relationship; as he's a shy and respectful guy, he follows her lead. She eventually becomes comfortable enough to kiss him, though it takes a lot of mental prep.
• Chekhov's Gun: In "Invisible", Astrid waxes poetic to Raph about composer Johann Sebastian Bach, specifically that he ciphered his own name into two pieces using the German musical scale. When she's kidnapped by the Serial Killer, he makes her re-shelve the files on his kills lest they be used to identify him, but she leaves them shelved in a pattern imitating Bach's cipher and spelling out the killer's name (he's one of their own forensics techs).
• Da Chief: Commissaire Carl Bachert, Raph's long-suffering superior who is stuck riding herd on her Cowboy Cop tendencies. Like Fournier, he's initially skeptical of including Astrid, but she wins him over with her contributions to investigations.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • Raph's son Théo is a fairly prominent recurring character in the first season, but rarely appears after that.
  • Raph's prosecutor boyfriend Mathias only appears in the second season and vanishes without explanation in the third. Presumably the events of "In Custody" caused enough professional and personal conflict between them that they broke up.
• Cliffhanger:
  • At the end of "You Only Die Once", Astrid and Raph are suddenly confronted by armed men in the street and forced into a mysterious SUV.
  • The final episode of S5, "One Wedding and Four Funerals", ends with Raphaëlle being poisoned by Lamarck at Astrid's wedding.
• Clones Are People, Too: One of the bodies of the week is a genetic scientist researching human cloning. Suffering from a rare disease, he cloned himself twenty years ago in order to farm healthy stem cells to transplant to himself, but even though his business partner tried to convince him that it was only an Expendable Clone, he was unable to see him as anything but what he was, a human baby, and adopted him. However, due to the shortcomings of the process back in the '90s, the son has developed a generalized cancer: most of his organs are slowly and painfully shutting down and he is dying at only twenty. The squad accuses the business partner of causing this tragedy by playing God without care for the victims, but at least the son was able to grow up with a mostly loving family and even find love, which was not granted to other "experiments".
• Conspiracy Theorist: "Global Plan" centres around the murder of an astronomer whose discovery of a secret satellite aroused conspiracy theories. The conspiracy film-makers are depicted as con artists who rely on Manipulative Editing, and the murder turns out to be because of sexual jealousy over one of them having sex with the astronomer.
• Consulting a Convicted Killer: The murderer from season one's "Closed Room" tries to seduce Astrid into having a relationship like this with him in the third season's "Unlocked Room".
• Contemplation Location: Astrid has an austere, otherwise-unused room within the archive building where she goes to work on her most difficult problems. It's a big thing whenever anybody else is allowed inside.
• Contrived Coincidence: The escaped inmate in "In Custody" was inspired to seek Astrid out because she was a cellmate of Sympathetic Murderer Violetta Flores from the pilot.
• Cop and Scientist: The main protagonists of the series are Cowboy Cop Raphaëlle Coste and archivist and amateur criminologist Astrid Nielsen.
• The Coroner: Dr. Henry Fournier, a grumpy, grizzled old doctor. He's initially dismissive and hostile towards Astrid; however, after her suggestions for closer checks on autopsies in "Puzzle" and "The Haunting" prove correct, he warms up to her and starts being more thorough in his examinations in hopes of anticipating her. She in turn tries to be nicer to him after Coste explains she's being a little rude by questioning his expertise so bluntly.
• Crossover: A special episode aired in 2024 where Astrid and Raph worked together with Alexandra Ehle from the concurrent French Forensic Drama of the same title.
• Cut Apart: In "Invisible", we see intercutting scenes of the killer exercising and then hearing a knock at his door, and the police knocking on their suspect's door. It's then revealed that the police are arresting another, innocent, man, and the killer is receiving a package from a courier service.
• Daddy's Girl: Astrid was raised by her single father, a Doting Parent who struggled but more often than not managed to make the best of a complicated situation. Astrid was a wreck when he died and still keeps his bedroom untouched in her apartment.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • Astrid's mother disappeared when she was too young to remember her, and she was hounded out of public school by ableist bullying from virtually her entire class, and is fearful of mental hospitals due to an early misdiagnosis of schizophrenia and multiple authority figures insisting she be institutionalized. Her father is portrayed more sympathetically in flashbacks and got her the job at Criminal Records, but he's still shown making a number of (well-intentioned) errors in raising her.
  • Raphaëlle's past isn't as bad, but she has a strained relationship with her father, a senior lawyer whom she fears she disappointed, a sister whom she dislikes and views as shallow and selfish, and a junkie brother who died young due to his addiction.
• Dead Guy Junior: A version of this for Niels Langlais, who is Angus Nielsen's son.
• Deadly Prank: Turns out to be the motive for murder in "Madman's Sacrifice". The four victims were chess masters who conspired together to drug the favourite in a tournament the evening before, so that he would oversleep and not get to the venue in time. Unfortunately, they didn't anticipate that he would be driving a car home, and the drug caused him to crash, suffering brain damage that ruined his ability to play chess. Years later, he tried to kill them all for revenge.
• Defective Detective: Astrid is highly gifted as a detective, but her autism is definitely strong enough to go beyond "cute" eccentricity and causes her severe distress at times.
• Depraved Kids' Show Host: In "The Starling", Carmine, a TV conjurer who mostly appealed to a child audience, was actually a paedophile who abused juvenile offenders who he was supposed to be mentoring and supporting.
• Detective Mole: In "30,000 Feet", Comissaire Bourgoin of the Gendarmerie is the murderer.
• Dies Wide Open: A plot point in "Invisible". When people die with their eyes open, the corneas rapidly cloud over due to oxidation, but this doesn't happen with the eyelids shut. The Body of the Week's eyes are cloudy but closed, which leads Astrid to suspect that the killer closed them after a lengthy interval, and provides her a clue to the Serial Killer's M.O.
• Disability Immunity:
  • The killer in "Invisible" has hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, which means that he has no hair anywhere on his body and no sweat glands, so he leaves very few forensic traces behind him.
  • In "Irezumi", Raphaëlle constantly struggles with the people related to the Body of the Week, which belongs to a Japanese enclave: they're sticklers for Japanese social rules and won't even say a word to someone who doesn't act properly around them. However, Astrid is autistic and therefore anything social for her is a practiced skill, so she has no default social behavior to hamper her and is actually able to navigate these very codified interactions (which she was taught by her grocer, a Japanese immigrant, since she was a child) more easily than the laid-back attitudes of her neurotypical colleagues.
• Disowned Parent: Astrid's mother Mathilde abandoned the family when Astrid was an infant, out of fear she might harm her autistic daughter as her own mother had Mathilde's autistic brother. She tries to reconnect with the now-30-year-old Astrid in season 1, but Astrid rejects her as a parent, having no emotional connection to her that way. Instead, having reconnected with her at a tangram tournament, she chooses to think of her as "Mathilde the fabulous tangram player". They eventually develop a friendship strong enough for Astrid to invite her to her appartment.
• The Dreaded: In "You Only Die Once", the mysterious mob assassin known as "the Reptile", who has killed over fifty people.
• Everybody Did It: In "The Arabian Nights" the victim, a former Iranian secret police torturer who had gained asylum by impersonating one of his own victims, was killed by a conspiracy of all three women who had suffered at his hands, organised by his therapist, who didn't buy his claims to redemption. Raph says herself that all three suspects are perfect candidates to have murdered him - because all of them did. Nico compares it to Murder on the Orient Express.
• Evil Counterpart: In "Witness", Jules and Gabriel are not so much Evil as Dysfunctional Counterparts to William and Paul. Jules and William are both autistic railway enthusiasts, but while William's brother Paul is a doctor whom William remembers as nothing but loving and supportive to him, Gabriel is a drug dealer who is much more uncomprehending and hostile towards his autistic brother.
• Expy: The creators have publicly said that Astrid and Raph were originally imagined as female versions of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
• Famed in Story: When Astrid attends police academy, she has initially a traumatic flashback to her last, disastrous time attending public school. Once the other police cadets realize who she is, however, they turn out to be admirers of her work with the judicial police, and one even criticizes the instructor for putting her on the spot and causing her to have a burnout.
• Faux Death: In "Death and Company", Paul is near-fatally poisoned with tetrodotoxin, but revives when the embalmer injects him with his propriety preservation mixture, which contains strychnine.
• Foreshadowing: At the end of "In Custody" (the season 2 finale), immediately after Commissaire Bachert tells Raphaëlle that Astrid is barred from participating in future investigations due to her not being a police officer, there's a dialogue-free scene that takes place in a hallway outside the Crime Squad's office (specifically, the scene where Raphaëlle tries to phone Astrid) in which a recruitment poster emblazoned with the phrase "DEVENEZ POLICIER" (which translates to "become a police officer" in English) in large red letters is visible in the background, thus foreshadowing the next season's ongoing story arc, where Astrid attends police academy.
• For Science!: In "Immortal", Moretti justifies his unethical genetic experiments on humans this way, arguing that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
• Frame-Up: In "Invisible", a woman is murdered, with the eyelids closed after, and the forensic evidence leads to her pot dealer, who lives in the same building and is awaiting trial for assault. However, he insists he's innocent, and something feels off to Astrid. She discovers a total of thirteen murders where the eyelids were closed afterward and the defendant was convicted based solely on forensic evidence and insisted on their innocence. She therefore concludes they're dealing with a Serial Killer who frames innocent people for his murders. Ironically, when the killer realizes she's onto him, he kills her mentor Mr. Gaillard and stages the scene to make it look like she did it, but she leaves clues that lead the team right to him.
• Gondor Calls for Aid:
  • In "In Custody", when Raph and Astrid are under arrest following the hostage debacle at the archive, Astrid contacts William's brother in his role as a doctor, and gets him to pass on a message to the support group to track down the potential perpetrators of the original murder.
  • In "Madman's Sacrifice", the support group are conscripted to comb through several years' worth of chess tournament records to identify the game that contained a specific sequence of moves referenced by the killer.
  • In "One Wedding and Four Funerals", the support group members, Raph and Nicolas all come to the archive to help Astrid solve the puzzles sent to her by the killer.
• Greek Chorus: Astrid regularly attends a support group for people on the spectrum, whose discussions are frequently relevant to her cases.
• Hacker Cave: William's flat is filled with assorted computer equipment.
• Hates Being Touched: Astrid gets overstimulated easily, with physical contact being a particular stressor. This causes a problem in season 3 when she begins contemplating a First Kiss with her boyfriend Tetsuo. She finally works up the courage to try kissing him in "Golden Blood", asking him to close his eyes and not move so that she can control the contact.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: A character in "Baptism of the Dead" is a former armed robber and cop killer who joined a Mormon community under a false name to hide, but then underwent a genuine religious conversion and reformed. A murder in the community leads to his true identity being exposed, and he gracefully submits to trial for his crimes.
• High-Class Call Girl: Ambre in "The Starling" is an expensive escort who specialises in "girlfriend experience".
• Hijacked by Ganon: The murder in "One Wedding and Four Funerals" turns out to have been plotted by Alain Lamarck, the killer from "Closed Room" who also appeared in "Unlocked Room".
• Hollywood Autism: Reconstructed. While the series still leans on a number of the common Hollywood tropes about autism (such as Astrid being an Inspirationally Disadvantaged genius criminologist with a borderline photographic memory for factoids), it does go to a lot of effort to present people on the spectrum as accurately and respectfully as possible. One of the series' lead writers is autistic and they have autistic people beta-read the scripts, and Astrid's actress Sara Mortensen sat in on autism support groups to learn her role. Astrid's own autism group plays a significant role in several episodes. Astrid's particular symptoms are (in no particular order): a special interest in puzzles (criminology is an extension of this), being prone to meltdowns in noisy environments or if her daily routine is disrupted, difficulty with idioms and social cues, and having an odd gait and avoiding eye contact.
• Hostage Situation: The concept of "In Custody". Astrid and Raph smuggle a convicted murderer who claims to be innocent into the archive so that they can check the records of her case, but when one of the other archivists challenges her she panics and takes them hostage.
• I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Anne Langlais, Astrid's police academy instructor, turns out to be a reformed Dirty Cop who fell in love with Astrid's father Angus while trying to wreck his organized crime investigation. The leader of the gang, an import/export executive, took her son hostage to make her warn him of a raid by Angus; she thought he would just move the goods, but he instead had Angus killed. Anne is now trying to make up for what she did by ensuring Astrid passes the academy.
• Imagine Spot: In "Natives", when Max visits the archive to translate some emails written in Atikamekw, he imagines himself dancing in Cheyenne clothing to give himself strength to visit a new and intimidating place.
• Important Haircut: Raph cutting her hair in season 4 isn't that big a deal, but it is to Astrid, who struggles a lot with change.
• Insistent Terminology: It's "puzzle", not "brain-teaser" ("casse-tête" or "headbreaker" in French), because Astrid thinks visually and dislikes the image the word invokes. This is the source of a minor joke in "Natives": Astrid insists on calling the murder weapon a "mace" even though its technical name is a "head-cracker" in the literal sense, seemingly associating it with her disliked term for puzzles.
• Internal Affairs: In "In Custody", Astrid and Raph are questioned by a stern but eventually sympathetic internal affairs officer named Wurlitzer who is investigating the hostage situation and their behaviour that helped cause it.
• Intimate Marks: In "Chaînon Manquant" the victim, Dana Barett, has tattoos across her whole body, including on her breasts, stomach and thighs close to her vagina.
• Jack the Ripoff: The motivation for the murder of the Serial Killer Noisay in "30,000 Feet" — Comissaire Bourgoin murdered a politician who was investigating corruption in his squad as a copycat killing for Noisay, and then killed Noisay so he couldn't deny committing the murder.
• Jerkass: Mathias patronises Raph both in their work and in private, lies to her son in front of her about whether they're dating, and eats her food in restaurants. He must be really good in bed for her to put up with him.
• Laser Sight: When Astrid and Raph catch "the Reptile" in "You Only Die Once", they seem about to be shot by the killer, until the room suddenly fills with laser sight spots, revealing that they brought a SWAT team.
• Libation for the Dead: In "Irezumi", Ken places a burning cigarette upright on the ground and pours some sake out in memory of a dead friend whom he killed. At the end of the episode, Astrid does the same outside the archive building for her mentor Gaillard.
• Like Brother and Sister: In "Death and Company", when Nicolas tries to confess his love to Raph, she misunderstands him as being jealous of her friendship with Astrid and tells him that she loves him like a brother.
• Limited Wardrobe: Astrid always wears her hair in a tight ponytail and keeps the same outfit (black skinny jeans, blue cotton shirt, black wool sweater), even in flashbacks. Eventually, she explains to Niels that it makes it simpler to get dressed in the morning, and that the soft fabrics help with her Sensory Overload.
• Literal-Minded:
  • Astrid is a bit literal-minded and often has trouble with figurative language, one of the worst cases being a near-meltdown after Raph texts her to "drop everything" when the Body of the Week drops in the middle of Astrid's weekly grocery shopping trip, disrupting her routine. After a couple of such miscommunications, Raph learns to tell Astrid much more precisely what she needs from her.
  • At one point in "Global Plan", Raph says that she hopes that the police are "on the right side" in the current investigation, because some people "higher up" (meaning from the national government) might have had some objection to the murdered astronomer's plans to announce his discovery to the public.^note Later on in that episode, the government interferes with the murder investigation by demanding that one of the suspects must be released from prison, in response to protestors who were demanding her release from prison because they incorrectly believed that she was arrested as part of a cover-up of a Government Conspiracy. Astrid's immediate reaction to this is to look straight up at the ceiling.
• Literary Allusion Title:
  • "The Man Who Never Was" is named after The Man Who Never Was, and involves a Body of the Week that used a series of fake identities.
  • "The Dead and Company" seems to be named after Dead & Company, a supergroup formed by former members of The Grateful Dead.
  • "The Arabian Nights" is, obviously, named after Arabian Nights.
  • The title of "They Shoot Jockeys, Don't They?" appears to be a send-up of Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, "jockey" being a term for a competitive equestrian.
  • "A Wedding and Four Funerals" is an obvious inversion of Four Weddings and a Funeral.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: The plot of "Golden Blood" involves a little girl who is dying of sickle-cell disease, but can only receive blood from another person with the same extremely rare blood group.
• Locked Room Mystery:
  • "Closed Room": A famously reclusive author is found dead in his locked apartment of an apparent suicide by cyanide, but nobody can find the poison bottle, which leads Astrid to suspect murder. The killer put the cyanide in the victim's ice cube tray and then just waited for him to use the cubes in his whiskey.
  • "30,000 Feet": A Serial Killer being transported back to France for trial suddenly dies in a closed airliner lavatory. Astrid quickly discovers that the killer injected him with hydrogen gas, which gave him an acute case of the bends when the airliner had to climb to get above turbulence—which means the killer must be on the plane with them.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • The haunted house in the second episode could just be a creaky old house with an ergot fungus problem. But even Astrid is open to the idea that it could really be haunted by the ghost of a murdered chambermaid (at least, to the extent that she doesn't think that there's sufficient evidence either to believe in or disbelieve in ghosts). Then, in the final shot, we see the deserted house from outside at night, and the candelabra-carrying ghost Raphaëlle saw moves through an upper floor.
  • "Memento Mori" never addresses whether the "apparition" both the victim and the abbot reported seeing was the genuine article, mostly because it turns out to be a Red Herring unrelated to the murder.
  • In season 4, a man is stabbed by a woman who claims to be his time-traveling Child by Rape, looking to protect the world from his influence as a future politician and avenge her mother. It turns out that she was the impregnated rape victim, and was diagnosed with severe psychosis years back; the team deduces that her mind made up the time travel story to cope. When Raph meets the woman's young daughter at the end of the episode, however, she is bearing the exact same scar on her arm as the alleged time traveller. As Astrid points out, while time travel has never existed in the past, there is no evidence that it will never exist in the future. The mystery woman's fingerprints and DNA are not taken, for unclear reasons, so her identity remains in doubt. She vanishes impossibly while being transported in a prison van. Any other week Astrid would have considered this a classic "locked room puzzle" that she had to solve, but everyone decided that maybe she really did return to the future, or perhaps the evil oil company bribed the guards to let her go and lie about it. Either way they did not investigate further, because she was only guilty of attempted murder of an Asshole Victim.
  • In season 5, Jenson, a voodoo practitioner, curses Nicolas to temporarily lose his voice by telling him he's making him choke on his words. Astrid and Delphine explain to him that it was only caused by suggestion and placebo, but Nicolas is a skeptic to begin with, and Jenson's words were not that explicit...
• Mission Control: In "Madman's Sacrifice", a chess master is discovered to be cheating by having coded messages sent to his smartwatch, from a confederate in a room in the hotel where the tournament is being held, who is using a chess computer to suggest moves.
• Mistaken for Insane:
  • Part of Astrid's Dark and Troubled Past as a young autistic girl was being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and getting involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital after she had a meltdown at school. This gets brought up in the pilot after she's mistakenly arrested in connection with the Body of the Week (who by coincidence was the doctor who misdiagnosed her, thus apparently giving her a motive to kill him), and again on later occasions when cases take the team to the same psychiatric hospital.
  • Inverted in "The Haunting": Raph and Astrid are told about Laure Gana's symptoms by a woman they take to be an employee of the psychiatric hospital. They don't find out until the end of the episode that Mathilde was in fact a patient who had voluntarily committed herself for a burnout, and that she was Astrid's Missing Mom all along.
• Mistaken for Romance: The latest obstacle to Raph and Nicolas managing to get together at the beginning of Season Four. She sees him and the new female team member Norah making plans to get together after work, and assumes it's for a romantic date. Depressed over that, she gets drunk at a bar and impulsively takes the sexy barman home with her. Nicolas comes to see her the next morning and they sort out the misunderstanding... at which point the barman walks out of her bedroom and an argument ensues.
• Musical Theme Naming: In "In Custody", three of the guest characters are named after types of electric or electronic musical instrument. The woman who takes Astrid and Raph hostage is named "Martenot", the internal affairs officer who questions Raph and Astrid is named "Wurlitzer", and the head of the SWAT team is named "Korg".
• New Old Flame: In the second season, Raphaëlle rekindles her affair with Mathias Forest, a public prosecutor whom she used to date when they were both in law school.
• No Badge? No Problem!: Zig-Zagged. Astrid is an Amateur Sleuth whose day job is handling documents at the Criminal Records building, but she also regularly examines crime scenes and sometimes even interviews witnesses (though this is rare because her challenges with social cues make this difficult). This is initially let slide because she's so helpful, and, per Raph in the pilot, it helps that, even if Astrid isn't technically a cop, she is a duly sworn civil servant of the Ministry of Justice via her day job at Criminal Records. Unfortunately, her attempt to clear the name of an innocent woman in "In Custody" turns into a Hostage Situation that ends with Raph getting shot in the shoulder trying to protect the real killer from the hostage-taker, leading to her getting banned from taking part in any further investigations. However, in "Global Plan", she manages to impress the Prefect of Police when she helps resolve a murder case that turned political. The Prefect overturns her firing, but only on condition that Astrid attend and pass police academy within the year. She succeeds and is given the rank of lieutenant in the judicial police, ending the show's use of the trope altogether.
• No One Sees the Boss: In "Immoral", Marchand ran his biotech company under a pseudonym and with only one trusted friend communicating with the other staff, because they were doing irresponsible and illegal human genetic engineering experiments.
• Not a Party Person: Played for Drama in "Fulcanelli" when Raph invites Astrid to her birthday party at the precinct's Local Hangout, without considering what the Sensory Overload would likely do to someone who habitually wears hearing protection just to walk the Paris streets. Astrid gives Raph a thimble as a birthday present, causing a round of confused muttering, and then leaves in tears, and Raph quickly runs after her to apologize for her mistake.
• Not-So-Fake Prop Weapon: In "One Wedding and Four Funerals", the first murder takes place on a film set and involves a pistol loaded with blank cartridges for a murder scene being replaced by one with live ammunition.
• Now Allowed to Hug: Invoked by Astrid, who normally Hates Being Touched because one of her autism symptoms is hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli. This causes a problem when she decides she wants to try having a First Kiss with her boyfriend Tetsuo, who fortunately is a very Understanding Boyfriend. In the end she starts by asking him to close his eyes and remain very still so that she can control the contact.
• Old Man Marrying a Child: In "Baptism of the Dead", the victim, a middle-aged man, was planning to marry a teenage girl. Raphaëlle is shocked to discover that her parents and the other members of their Mormon community saw nothing immoral in this.
• Omniglot: Justified in "Natives". Max, one of Astrid's autism group members, is revealed to speak 41 languages (they're his special interest), of which 34 are First Nations tongues he's trying to preserve (he's Cheyenne by birth). Conveniently, one of them is Atikamekw, a Canadian Algonquin language spoken by a tribe of same name involved in the Case of the Week.
• Out-Gambitted: In "Invisible", one of Astrid's coworkers knocks a can of toothpicks on the ground in front of her and asks if she can count them (a Shout-Out to a scene in Rain Man). She says she can't, but then tells him that it's possible to make four equilateral triangles with just six toothpicks, and then walks off. He's shown later to have spent practically the whole day working on it, and develops a new respect for Astrid when he figures out the trick.^note You have to think in 3D and stack some of the toothpicks on top of the others.
• Parental Abandonment: Astrid's mother Mathilde left when Astrid was an infant, after she was diagnosed: it's revealed that a sexist psychiatrist unsubtly blamed her for Astrid's ASD^note French psychiatry has a reputation for dealing with autism badly, due to stubbornly holding onto the "refrigerator mother" psychoanalytic theory that claimed autism was caused by a lack of maternal affection long after it was abandoned elsewhere, and also that Mathilde herself had an autistic younger brother whom their mother murdered and she feared she might do the same to her own child. Astrid's father did his best to raise her properly by himself, but died in the line of duty a few years back.
• Parents as People: Astrid's late father Angus is shown in flashbacks as a genuinely loving Family Man, but also struggling with the demands of being both a police detective and a single father to an autistic child. On a number of occasions he accidentally sets off burnout symptoms by reacting too harshly to Astrid, such as a scene in "Puzzle" where he walks in on her looking through a case file he'd brought home. But he's also shown genuinely trying to learn what makes his daughter tick and connect with her, and goes full-on Papa Wolf to others who mistreat her.
• Phantom Thief: The title character in "The Starling" is a wealthy lawyer, who is secretly a burglar who pulls off spectacular heists without any violence.
• Poisoned Weapons: The notorious mob killer known as "the Reptile" is so called because their trademark weapon is a dart loaded with mamba venom.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: In-Universe example. By mid-season 2, people in the precinct have started calling the leads "Astraëlle".
• The Profiler: Delphine Simon, who appears in a handful of episodes, and works very well with Astrid as they share a MO of pattern recognition.
• Put on a Bus: At the end of season 3, the victim's widow steals Arthur's gun from his holster and kills the culprit, who was probably going to get away with his crime. Arthur, while recognized innocent by the following inquiry, is deeply distraught by this and decides to leave the force.
• Quip to Black: Fournier pulls an understated one on Raph in The Teaser of "Memento Mori". Off Astrid's deduction that a murdered Benedictine monk wiped off the candle spike he was fatally stabbed with, Raph wonders aloud what kind of victim would protect his own murderer. Fournier replies, "You're not going to like it," and points out the icon of Christ on the cross. Roll credits off Raph's nonplussed look.
• Rail Enthusiast: William, the leader of Astrid's support group, is a railway enthusiast with a particular love of the État 231G class Pacific, and the first time he uses his computer skills to help with a case, Raphaëlle rewards him with tickets for a heritage train excursion.
• Red Baron: berezin_28. Even William, who has been in an online relationship with her for five years, doesn't know her real name. It eventually comes out when she is officially needed by the police (it's Camille).
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Raphaëlle's "red" warmth, emotionality, and disorganisation are contrasted with the "blue" ultra-controlled and obsessively organized Astrid. This is a source of some tension in their relationship, but they do their best to accommodate one another.
• Refusal of the Call: Early in season 6, Bachert announces that he's leaving the squad and offers to recommend Raph as his successor. She considers it, especially since it would allow her to keep working effectively with her new poison-induced disabilities, but she eventually refuses, as she loves being on the field too much and still hopes to make a recovery.
• Relationship Labeling Problems: Tetsuo Tanaka is Astrid's first romance ever, so she often struggles with how to approach it given her challenges with social skills. In "Memento Mori", Raph suggests dinner at her place for when Astrid passes the police academy exams, and says Astrid could bring Tetsuo, referring to him as her boyfriend. Astrid is somewhat taken aback by this: she's been seeing Tetsuo for the better part of two seasons and doesn't exactly reject the idea of referring to him as her boyfriend, it just never occurred to her.
• Replacement Goldfish: The killer in "Witness" is a woman whose young autistic son died of an epileptic fit and has latched onto another young autistic boy he was friends with. She kills the boy's father (albeit accidentally; his father was actually the one who brought the gun involved and had planned to kill her with it because he saw her as a threat to his family), keeps his mother tied up, and eventually kidnaps both him and his non-autistic college-age brother via sedative to play pretend family with.
• Repressed Memories:
  • Sophia in "The Fermi Paradox" has repressed memories of seeing her family massacred during The Yugoslav Wars, which she falsely interprets as signs of alien abduction.
  • In the fifth season, Astrid discovers that she has repressed memories of taking part in a horse-riding scheme for disabled children when she was young, which ended badly when a bullying riding teacher was kicked to death by a horse while threatening her and her friend Sami. The partial memories she initially recovered made her suspect that she'd killed the teacher herself.
• Resignations Not Accepted: In the backstory of "You Only Die Once", the mob family who usually employed "the Reptile" tried to pull this when their killer tried to retire. When the mob tried to put pressure on, the angry assassin killed several of their bosses until they backed off.
• Retired Monster:
  • The killer in "The Fermi Paradox" is a fugitive Bosnian Serb war criminal, who committed the murder when he was recognised by a survivor of an atrocity he helped to commit.
  • The victim in "The Arabian Nights" is a former torturer from Iran who was assassinated by three of his former victims working together.
• Reverse Whodunnit:
  • The killer in "Invisible" is introduced as such in the first moments of the episode, although we don't find out his full identity until partway through the episode.
  • Subverted in "One Wedding and Four Funerals". The opening minutes of the episode show the perpetrator of the first murder committing the crime in detail, but it then turns out that he was manipulated into committing the crime by a third party.
• Revisiting the Cold Case: Justified: Astrid's day job at Criminal Records means that lots of episodes involve looking at old case files, often from unsolved crimes, and connecting them to the Case of the Week. This ultimately includes the unsolved murder of Astrid's own father in the season 3 finale.
• Sacrificial Lion: Gaillard, Astrid's guardian and mentor, is murdered in "Invisible", the S1 finale.
• Sadist Teacher: Jacques Leibnitz, the organ teacher in "Fermata", whose extreme perfectionism and harsh approach drove at least two of his students to suicide attempts, one of whom then murdered him.
• Samus Is a Girl: In "You Only Die Once", the famed mob hitman "the Reptile" unexpectedly turns out to be a woman.
• Schedule Fanatic: Astrid has extremely regular schedules, going shopping on exactly the same days and times each week. This leads to her having a crisis when Raph texts her about the Body of the Week dropping in the middle of her shopping trip, due to Raph saying "drop everything"; after this incident, Raph learns to be more careful about how she says things to her.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: In "Global Plan", the killer electrocutes the victim in an elaborate way to make it appear that the murder was done using some kind of top secret Mad Science military weapon, in order to suggest that he was the victim of a government conspiracy.
• Sensory Overload: Autistic people often have difficulty with an excess of sensory stimuli. Astrid routinely wears construction-grade hearing protection when she has to go out on the city streets, and gets sent into a full-blown meltdown in "The Haunting" when a careless remark about the Body of the Week's very public death during opening statements of a big trial causes her to be swarmed by reporters. In season 3 it also interferes with her desire to have a First Kiss with her boyfriend Tetsuo: she ultimately asks him to close his eyes and stay very still so that she can control the contact.
• Sex for Services: In "Global Plan", the team acquires the uncut version of a video interview of the victim, a celebrity astronomer, by one of the suspects, a Conspiracy Theorist making a Documentary of Lies about the eponymous New World Order-style cabal. The first part of the interview, which was fully left out of the film, shows the astronomer refuting the conspiracy theory, but then there's a cut, and the astronomer is shown taking his seat again looking noticeably more unkempt before now backing up the conspiracy theory. They notice in a reflection that the documentarian's clothes are similarly more rumpled than before and realize that she had sex with him in exchange for backing her up.
• Sexual Euphemism: After a conversation in which Raph describes a date she went on and ends it with a tasteful ellipsis ("... and boom, y'know"), Astrid starts referring to sex as "going boom".
• Shout-Out: Now with its own page.
• Shout-Out Theme Naming:
  • "Puzzle": Three of the four victims are ciphers of Jurassic Park characters: Alain Grant (Alan Grant), Denis Nedry (Dennis Nedry), and Yann Malcolm (Ian Malcolm). Raphaëlle also speaks to a Dr. Thierry Rex by phone.
  • "The Haunting" has a bunch of Star Wars references. Laure Gana and Wilfred Tarquin reference Leia Organa and Wilhuff Tarkin from A New Hope; there's also a mention of a Max Rebo (the Ortolan keyboardist in Return of the Jedi), while a past victim is a man named Jabbah, born in Tataouine, Tunisia (referring to respectively Jabba the Hutt, the town the planet Tatooine was named after, and the country where most of the Tatooine scenes were shot).
  • In "Missing Link" characters are named after those from the original Ghostbusters (1984) — the victim is Dana Barett (the exact same name) and suspects include Raymond Stans (Raymond Stantz) and Pierre Venkman (Peter Venkman).
  • "The Man Who Never Was": The Body of the Week's aliases were all used by Arsène Lupin in various novels: Louis Valméras in The Hollow Needle, Maxime Bermond in Arsène Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes, and Victor Hautin from Victor of the Wordly Brigade.
  • "Unlocked Room": Characters are named after those in House — Foreman, Cuddy and Demaison ("House").
  • "Golden Blood": Characters are named after those in Dracula — the victim is Jonathan, another character is called Mina, and medical supplies are from a company called "Helsing".
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: The killer in "Invisible" tries to get Astrid to think that they're the same, as he was bullied for his physical disabilities. Astrid responds that she didn't turn her pain into hatred like him.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Raph. It surprises Astrid at first, but eventually it comes to amuse her.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Anne Langlais reveals in the season 3 finale that Angus Nielsen got her pregnant before his murder, meaning Astrid has a seven-year-old half-brother. She asks Astrid to take care of him since she's headed to prison for killing the Corrupt Corporate Executive behind Angus's murder.
• Speech-Impeded Love Interest: berezin_28, William's girlfriend, is fully non-verbal, and uses text-to-speech to communicate. Don't be fooled by her Cute Mute appearance, though; she's a dark web hacker by trade.
• Start My Own: The victim in "Baptism of the Dead", a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, turns out to have been plotting to start a schismatic Mormon church.
• Struggling Single Mother: Raph is divorced from her teenage son's father and is frequently shown scrambling to balance being a mom with her police career. Fortunately her son is pretty well-behaved, and he also quickly takes a liking to Astrid as a surrogate big sister.
• Subculture of the Week: "Baptism of the Dead" revolves around a murder in a Mormon community.
• Suicide by Cop: In "The Man Who Never Was", Cassandre provokes the prison warders into shooting her by taking Raph hostage and then pretending to cut her throat (but only inflicting a minor wound).
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Norah in Season Four for Arthur. Like him, she's a laid back ethnic-minority copper with IT talents, but with a Gender Flip.
• The Svengali: Louvet, the victim in "Guilty", was a corrupt football agent who financially exploited young Africans with dreams of playing in Europe.
• Swapped Roles: Early on in the series, Astrid takes Raphaëlle on as her "thimble", a person who helps her navigate the world without getting hurt as a thimble allows someone to sew without hurting their fingers, a role Raph takes very seriously. After being poisoned at the end of season 5, Raph is left with serious neurological side-effects and very psychologically vulnerable due to her new disabilities, and asks Astrid to be her thimble in turn while she recovers, a mark of trust which moves Astrid to tears.
• Sympathetic Murder Backstory: "Memento Mori": The Body of the Week turns out to have accidentally beaten his girlfriend's rapist to death 15 years ago, then left the country to become a Benedictine monk out of guilt. He was in turn killed after being transferred back to Paris by the man's vengeful younger brother—and told the younger man he forgave him as the man stabbed him to death.
• Sympathetic Murderer:
  • The killer in "Puzzle". Violetta Flores and her sister Cattleya were forced into prostitution as teenagers and sold to rich overseas visitors in Columbia. Her four victims were the men who took them onto a boat, gang-raped them both, and accidentally killed Cattleya, and she started hunting them down when the police in both Columbia and France wouldn't touch the case of a Disposable Sex Worker.
  • Downplayed in "The Haunting". The victim turns out to be a former member of a French neo-Nazi group who killed a female member's Tunisian boyfriend, causing her to go insane. The "killer" planted a bomb on his car (which goes off when it's towed), but says he only meant to scare him into confessing because he's the woman's son. The actual cause of death was Takotsubo cardiomyopathy resulting from him accidentally scaring the victim to death because he looks similar to his murdered father.
  • Subverted in "Natives". One suspect confesses to killing the first victim out of revenge for his role in getting him sent to a boarding school where he and his friends were mistreated for being First Nations. Astrid realizes he didn't do it because he gets details of the crime wrong in his confession. Turns out he was trying to take the fall for his father.
  • In the last episode of season 3, Astrid and Anne finally find out who killed Angus, Astrid's dad, but the murderer is likely to get away with it due to his influence, so Anne chooses to shoot him dead instead. She goes to prison, but Astrid often visits her in prison and she remains a sympathetic character, especially due to being Niels's mother.
• Take That!: The first season takes a number of potshots at Rain Man, a film which is widely despised among people on the autism spectrum for being the Trope Codifier for Hollywood Autism, using references to it in incidents of ableist bullying directed at the autistic title character.
  • In "The Haunting", Astrid is shown in a Troubled Backstory Flashback being bullied by kids in her class chanting "Rain Man" at her as an insult.
  • In "Invisible", one of Astrid's coworkers, who was shown being a Jerkass to her in the Pilot Movie, knocks a can of toothpicks on the floor to try to get her to count them like Ray. She replies that it's possible to make four equilateral triangles with just six toothpicks, and then walks off. He's shown later to have spent the whole afternoon trying to figure it out and genuinely starts to respect her afterwards.
• Techno Wizard: Norah, who joins the squad in season 4, is this, though unlike most examples, she's also shown to spend time on the field and be good at it.
• Theme Naming: One example that doesn't fit into a subtrope: in "Madman's Sacrifice" the four victims are all named after the names of chess pieces in their first languages - "Koenig" (German for "King"), "Koroleva" (Russian for "Queen") and "Naito" (Japanese loan-word for "Knight").
• Throwing Off the Disability: Reconstructed. Raph is poisonned at the end of season 5, and survives, but the substance left serious after-effects to her nervous system, notably preventing her to from walking for most of season 6, with the recovery being challenging both physically and psychologically. Even though she eventually recovers the use of her legs, she still loses a lot of fine motricity that she may never get back.
• Tomboyish Name: Raphaëlle is often called Raph, a nickname more evocative of the male version of the name.
• Trauma Button: In "Unlocked Room", Astrid has to investigate a murder in the secure ward of a mental hospital, and suffers tramatic flashbacks to her own forced hospitalisation as a teenager.
• Tropaholics Anonymous: Astrid's autism-spectrum support group plays a major role in the show.
• Troubled Backstory Flashback: Astrid was subjected to a lot of bullying and abuse by authority figures, as well as a number of well-intentioned mistakes by her otherwise sympathetic father Angus, which is shown in flashbacks to her childhood throughout the series.
  • "Puzzle": After being wrongly taken in for questioning on suspicion of murdering her old psychiatrist, Alain Grant, Astrid flashes back on her last appointment with him, in which Grant tells Angus that Astrid will likely never be able to live independently. We're then shown a scene of Angus accidentally frightening Astrid with his reaction to her taking a look at a case file.
  • "The Haunting": A younger Astrid is depicted trying to attend public school but being the target of ableist bullying by her classmates, including a girl who initially seems sympathetic and ingratiates herself with her, but then turns on her and joins in. This is capped off with the school principal telling Angus Nielsen to withdraw Astrid from the school: she argues that they don't have the resources to help her, but Angus not unreasonably accuses them of punishing the victim instead of the bullies.
• Two Dun It: In "30,000 Feet", Bourgoin actually murdered Noisay, while a different character tried to kill him with poisoned peanuts, which Bourgoin then ate and nearly died.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: Vassieux, Bachert's successor, is initially seen as this by Raph, as he is rather rude, obsessed with due process and bureaucracy, overly concerned with PR, and downright mean to Astrid (Astrid herself quite likes his regularity in all things.) He quickly goes through a Defrosting Ice Queen arc, as he comes to appreciate both Astrid's out-of-the-box thinking and Raph's dedication. Raph in turns finds out that while he's a pain to work with for a Cowboy Cop like her, he's extremely efficient when he does. By the end of the season, they agree that they started off on the wrong foot, and decide to start over.
• Ugly Baby: Played for Drama; one of Astrid's autism group members talks about how a neurotypical coworker was showing off a photo of his newborn son and asked her what she thought. Not understanding the question, she defaulted to Brutal Honesty and said she thought the baby was ugly, offending the new dad.
• Understanding Boyfriend: Tetsuo Tanaka is extremely considerate of Astrid's autism-related challenges with intimacy, and allows her to go at her own pace in their relationship. He explains once that he personally "gets it": while neurotypical, he's naturally shy and awkward, which was compounded when he was younger by being socially isolated in France due to being an immigrant.
• Unknown Relative:
  • Astrid's mother abandoned her when she was an infant; when they meet again in season 1, no one knows who she is at first.
  • In season 3, Astrid finds out that Anne, her tutor at the police academy, was actually her late father's girlfriend for several years before he died - he never mentioned her to his daughter because he did not want to cause her distress, but they were building up to introducing the two when he died. The reason for that was that Anne was pregnant, and Astrid has a young half-brother.
• Villainous Breakdown: The killer in "Madman's Sacrifice" breaks down and confesses on learning that his final victim survived the attack.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Astrid's late father is shown in several flashbacks calling out various authority figures, from her psychiatrist Alain Grant to her school principal, for mistreatment of her.
  • Several of Astrid's police academy classmates in season 3 turn out to be fans of hers, and call out the instructor, Anne Langlais, for picking on her. Anne turns out to be Astrid's father's former lover, and wants her to pass but took the wrong approach. They meet up after class and figure out a different way to handle things between them.
• Worthy Opponent: Subverted in "One Wedding and Four Funerals". When Lamarck confronts Astrid at the archives, he claims to view her as a worthy opponent and promises never to harm her, but at that point he's already planning to frame her for murder in a particularly sadistic way, and if that fails kill her at her wedding.
• Yakuza: The murder in "Irezumi" is related to Yakuza members living as ex-pats in France, although it's the result of a familial conflict rather than organised crime.
• You Have Failed Me: In "One Wedding and Four Funerals", Alain Lamarck throws Paul Gérard off a roof to his death for bungling the murder that Lamarck planned for him to commit.