Countdown to Thirteen: Broadchurch: Series 3, Episode 4 (2017)

I can’t quite tell how the investigation is going to go this season.  There are red flags here and there that seem so blatant, it’s hard to believe they could just be red herring, but I can’t see the show telegraphing the actual answers when they still have a ways to go.  Then again, not all these red flags are coming from the same source, and obviously, not all of them will be the rapist.  Is the moral of the story just that there’s a depressingly-large number of terrible, creepy men out there, a fact that’s been hammered home innumerably in real life over the past few months?

The police department discovers a recently-released sex offender whose M.O. seems to fit the details of Trish’s rape.  Naturally, Hardy gets along with this guy like a house on fire, but he’s not the only creep Hardy and Ellie have their eye on – several guys act incredibly shady, and one in particular has his DNA show up somewhere he really doesn’t want it to.  Over with the Latimers, Mark tries to figure out how to balance his need for greater resolution to Danny’s murder with his desire not to alienate his family.

In series 1, when Ellie and Hardy were investigating Danny’s death, there were lots of people interviewed by the police who did lots of immoral and/or illegal things that were in no way murdering an 11-year-old.  With the suspects our intrepid detectives are lining up here, though, I do wonder if the real intention is to show that, even though only one of them raped Trish, any of them very possibly could have done it under different circumstances.  There’s so much gross, discomfiting behavior on display, and given that we see it also cropping up in a recurring plot that has nothing to do with the investigation itself (two teenage boys getting suspended for watching porn at school,) the show may be looking to speak less about this specific crime and more about the systemic sexism that leads to the society in which it happened.  If that’s where we’re heading, I could get very excited about that.

Beth is involved in both the investigation story and the family story today.  In the former, she’s mostly just along for the ride in those scenes, there to support Trish but mostly staying in the background.  The exception is a really satisfying scene in which she dresses down one of Trish’s friends for trying to fish information from her; she doesn’t lose her temper, but she shuts the guy down in no uncertain terms and lets him know just how impossible is is for her to break Trish’s confidence.  And as for the stuff with Mark, I’m not quite sure how it’s headed.  It’s kind of interesting to see them on somewhat different sides of the issue than they were in previous seasons.  There, Beth was the one who felt like Mark was moving forward and she was stuck, but now, she honors her memories of Danny by trying to be a positive force in the lives of hurting people, and she doesn’t see any merit in dredging up the pain and anger again.