A third and final season, containing six 90 minute episodes, aired in 2013 with Charlotta Jonsson replacing the late Johanna Sällström as Linda Wallander.

The first of these films, Hämnden (The Revenge), was a theatrical release on 9 January 2009, directed by award-winning Paris-based Franco-Swedish director Charlotte Brandström.

[23] However, he later indicated that he would be interested in playing the role in an adaptation of the final Wallander novel, The Troubled Man, because "it is the definite end".

Reviewing The Village Idiot and The Brothers in the Financial Times, John Lloyd wrote: More evident is the philosophical underpinning that the books' author, Henning Mankell, brings, focusing down on the forensic work of a provincial detective the global sins of the western world.

This coming week’s episode, The Brothers, is a murder mystery emerging from a terrible crime perpetrated by a group of drunken men on colonised people; last week's, The Village Idiot, had at its core the moral obloquy of a private surgeon greedy for profit.

At one point, Wallander tells his daughter, Linda, who is applying to become a detective, that she should reflect—otherwise she, like him, will emerge from a tunnel 30 years later, wondering what had happened to life.

Carlsson further criticised that the middle films "are often predictable, tentative and carelessly made", and that the arrest of the criminal is anticlimactic.