Happy Valley: episode-by-episodeHappy ValleyHappy Valley recap: series 2, episode 5 – did Sally Wainwright rip off Steinbeck?
The penultimate episode had lots of booze, brilliant two-handers and a breathtaking ending that seemed shamelessly lifted from Of Mice and Men
This week, before Jake Bugg starts to sing … Catherine and Ann have had a long drunken night out, while Frances has made the petrol bomb she plans to throw through Catherine’s window. This episode was all talky character work, exploring the drama below the surface more than you might expect from a thriller a week ahead of its season finale. But the background of thrumming menace made everything unbearably tense.
Happy Valley works best when it is mixing extreme violence or suspense with quiet, quotidian moments. Each informs the other: the shocks are more profound when they happen to people and in places that exist in three tangible dimensions. And even when it is just two people chatting pleasantly over a cup of tea, they have some shadow over them – the effects of addiction or bereavement, usually – that means they are always alive with drama. That’s what we’ve got here, in the penultimate episode.
‘It’s her’
A note of praise for Happy Valley’s original music by Ben Foster. That strange, groaning glissando that keeps invading the soundtrack to signify doom? Perfectly unsettling. It plays as Frances sneakily observes what would otherwise be a low-stakes scene on the back step between Ann, who stayed over having been paralytic last night, and Daniel.
But Happy Valley’s inessential two-handers are always brilliant. Daniel opens up about the family falling apart after his sister’s suicide; Ann explains how she saw a date with John as a chance to ease back towards relationships with men following her horrific ordeal with Tommy Lee Royce. There’s an authentic tingle of unspoken chemistry between them.
Two other characters are thrown together, but with blackly comic energy. Catherine answers a call about a half-naked man screaming for entry to a pub: it’s Neil. In an episode awash with alcohol and its aftermath, Neil has reacted to the trauma of Vicky Fleming’s death by leaping off the wagon. There are laughs from the pub’s pompous manager (“You’re barred! You’re not welcome in these premises, at any point in the future!”) and from Neil making a spectacular exhibition of himself, but ultimately there’s nothing amusing for Catherine about having another addict in her life, ready to go off at any time.
Back at home, Ryan has rejected the replacement Scalextric bought by his granny and, after one more skin-crawling bit of grooming from Frances in the school library, has sent Tommy a letter. He’s also quizzed Daniel about his mum and dad. Having negotiated that – another deftly written bit of dialogue, in which the adult has to satisfy the child’s curiosity without actually telling him anything – Daniel comes up trumps by observing that Ryan’s doubts about Tommy are always expressed straight after school.
Meanwhile, Catherine has obtained CCTV footage of the Scalextric being purchased. She shows it to Clare, the only person who has met that new teaching assistant … and the Cawoods have cracked the case. But with Frances trying to get Ryan out of the house for a sleepover at a friend’s house, do they know how urgently they might need to act?
‘If it was me …’
Good times for bumbling murderer John, when he and Shackleton once again interview their prime serial-killer suspect. In a cast dotted with superb actors criminally underused (so far), Matthew Lewis gets his scene as the pathetic Sean, who has racked his brains while stewing in his cell and can explain the circumstantial evidence against him, but is so scrambled by the pressure he half-confesses anyway. He might have blacked out due to booze and then, who knows?
Sympathy for the monster as we forget, temporarily, that this guy did rape and throttle a prostitute for insisting on using a condom – he’s still the victim as John listens to him incriminate himself, that half-smile flickering into Kevin Doyle’s eyes again.
Sally Wainwright wrings more tension out of what must be going on in John’s head. Sean is charged and John stands and watches Shackleton read out the formalities. A nice bit of direction (Wainwright herself is behind the camera again this week) as, instead of training the lens on Doyle’s face, we move behind him to see his POV. Will he faint, scream, tremble, run away?
No. He’s eerily still and when he does react, it’s with macabre glee. He speeds home, blasting Don’t Stop Me Now on his car radio then dancing into his house with the manic bravado of Basil Fawlty after a bit of luck on the gee-gees. John taunts his wife for a bit – in front of the kids, yuk – then sets off again to find, and punch, Amanda’s bit on the side.
John’s joy is short-lived. Another woman is found, murdered while Sean was in custody. The cops have got the wrong man and urgently want to trace the driver of a red car, who pranged it near the crime scene and drove off.
‘I don’t think you’d like prison’
Cut immediately to the farm, where Daryl’s mum is bringing him a cup of tea, walking past his red car with a dented side. Uh-huh.
And so, the nail-biting climax isn’t whether Frances will kill Catherine: it’s what will happen after Daryl wakes his mum in the dead of night to confess he’s the serial killer. Will she react with disgust, or panic? Will he kill her too? The tears in her eyes glinting through the gloom are about all we can see – more fine direction – as she vows to stick by her offspring.
This mother has two more acts of kindness to perform for her son. She makes him a delicious fried breakfast and then, as he devours it, sneaks up behind him with a rifle. We cut to outside to look at the house, and the windows behind which terrible things happen in Happy Valley. As that music plays again, something sad and terrible does happen: there’s a single gunshot, and one of the windows is covered in blood. Wow.
I got you to look after me …
That ending took my breath away. It wasn’t until a few minutes after watching it that I realised it was basically Of Mice and Men, and later still that I twigged just how similar it was: not just the merciful bullet to the back of the head, but the kind, calming talk of an idyllic future that can never be. Shameless rip-off, or just what Daryl’s mum would naturally do? Maybe she’s read the book!
Another night in
Frances didn’t do much this week in the end, apart from hiding behind parked cars near the Cawood house. Instead, we saw how she’s living: in a sparse flat, praying over beans on toast while Radio 4 echoes out, and the light from the gas fire flickers over her Tommy Lee Royce shrine. Dark.
Mouth-to-mouth
Clare must really, really like Neil. Out of the police station he comes, stinking and ashamed, having gone boozing instead of helping Clare shift those bloody planks at the allotment – and she’s there waiting. If kissing your man on the lips after he’s spent a night in a cell for being drunk and disorderly isn’t true love, what is?
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