Other Doctor Lives: Broadchurch: Series 1, Episode 2 (2013)

*Written in 2017*

*It’s going to be tough to talk about any serialized mystery show without spoilers, but I’ll do my best to talk around it. While I will bring up different people under suspicion from episode to episode, I’ll keep mum on whether the killer is someone previously suspected and discarded or someone who hadn’t previously been on the radar.*

The plot thickens, as they say. Just getting warmed up, but you can tell it’s ramping up from here.

After the initial shock of the discovery of Danny’s body, the murder investigation is getting underway. Hardy is hard at work chasing leads, following an earlier account of someone seen arguing with Danny and checking out an empty hut not far from the cliffs where it was made to look like Danny fell. Although Ellie has her head in the game, it’s hard for her to come to grips with the fact that one of her neighbors might have killed Danny, and she bristles at Hardy’s cynicism and suspicion. In the Latimer house, everyone struggles to cope with the day-to-day, and secrets begin to be revealed from various members of the family.

Definitely not as good as the pilot, though that would have been a tall order. While the pilot is able to take its time mainly setting the scene and setting up the mystery, this episode has to begin the business of unraveling that, and it casts a pretty wide net. There’s no big focus yet in the investigation, and several different minor angles are explored. What it does do well is continue to flesh out the character of the town itself. I like the details of the overstretched police department, the rinky-dink local newspaper bracing itself for the arrival of a mass of out-of-town reporters, and assorted residents discussing the murder—both the empathetic (“How horrible it is for the family!”) and the more self-serving (“What effect will this have on the summer tourism?”)

Jodie Whittaker gets some big moments here, but I think she’s most effective in the smaller ones. Not that I begrudge Beth for screaming and breaking down—of course not. But for me, the moments where she gets me the most are in quiet scenes showing her grief in subtle ways. In this episode, the scene in the grocery store is by far the best. There’s so much involved in it—her itching need to get out of the house and be normal for two minutes, the sickening feeling of walking through the supermarket and knowing that everyone’s watching “the woman whose son was killed,” and that soft, pure moment where she sees Danny’s favorite cereal on the shelf and for a second loses herself in it. Beth, like the rest of her immediate family, has a secret, and she reveals it to one person in this episode. While the specifics of it are kind of soapy, the circumstances surrounding it make me entirely see why it would be such a head trip right now.

It’s always fun going back to a show you’ve seen before and discovering a face that’s since become familiar to you. Jack Ashton, who plays Tom on Call the Midwife, has a brief appearance in this episode. Jacob Anderson is also like that for me, by the way. Although I would have first seen Broadchurch after his initial appearance on Game of Thrones, I didn’t recognize him well enough at the time to know who he was. Now, every time I see him onscreen, I want to shout, “Grey Worm!” *2024 addition* Or, “Louis!”

*Written in 2024*

I don’t know if I’ll write about Jonathan Bailey every episode, similar to how my season 1 House of the Dragon posts for Matt Smith wound up becoming “the Matt Smith and Paddy Considine show.” But I do want to mention him again here. In this episode, we get a little character stuff from Olly but mainly exposition, helping an out-of-town reporter get the lay of the land with his local knowledge. Bailey does a nice job delivering this exposition in a way that tells us about Olly too. In his descriptions, we can hear that he’s restless where he is and very eager to be helpful to someone from a national paper. I also want to shout out Arthur Darvill as Paul, the local reverend. His performance is understated but excellent, offering care and comfort with genuine warmth behind it. He plays a religious character without feeling like a Religious Character, if you know what I mean.

We see the start of some friction between Hardy and Ellie in the pilot, and that gets more dimension here. Ellie is very unsettled by Hardy’s detached view that anyone in town could potentially be the murderer. As he urges her to be objective, she takes that as him wanting her to be cold and cynical like him—“You have to learn not to trust,” he tells her. When Ellie rejects his view that anyone could be capable of murder, insisting, “Most people have a moral compass,” he simply replies, “Compasses break!”

In addition to that, Hardy just gets under Ellie’s skin. In the pilot, she comes back from holiday to discover that he’s been given the promotion she was expecting, so that adds a little extra resentment to her response when he tries to advise her. And throughout this episode, we see him repeatedly fail her small-town nicety tests. When she brings him a coffee, and later fish ‘n’ chips, he flatly turns down her offer, and it doesn’t escape her notice that he fixes a cuppa for himself without making one for her. It all contributes to a minor blowup on her part, and to her, it probably doesn’t help that Hardy listens to her rant, takes a beat, and immediately returns to discussing the case.

One thing I’ve noticed about David Tennant’s performance is Hardy’s manner when he and Ellie are questioning someone. Hardy often has Ellie take the lead, hanging back and listening, only jumping in with a question of his own at critical moments. In other areas of the case, he’s more take-charge, offhandedly giving orders and expecting Ellie to keep up with his stride, but here, he’s more the observer. As such, it’s interesting to see him question a character without her at the end of the episode. I like seeing how his manner changes when he’s doing the face-to-face work.