*Spoilers for episode 2*
Ooh, this was a good episode! I’m far enough into the story that it’s easy to keep track of the many characters and multiple storylines. We get a lot more information about the Carys Howell mystery, more clues about the creepiness, and some shakeups in the relationship dynamics. I’d thought we might not get much of Joel Fry/Hal in this one, but there’s actually some great stuff for him here!
After learning of a connection between Ewan Dean (the late owner of the estate) and Rose, Matilda is more determined than ever to talk to her. Between Matilda’s prying and Aron trying to micromanage her, Rose has an enormous weight on her shoulders—people have started whispering about her again now that Matilda’s in town, and it’s hard for her to take. Meanwhile, Trudy, who runs the local pub, approaches Hal about wanting to talk to Matilda, revealing her own history with Carys.
Lots of good stuff going on here. I really like getting Trudy’s story (both in flashbacks at the start of the episode and in her later conversation with Matilda,) there’s a cool scene between Matilda and Meredith, and we’re getting hints of possible shadiness going on with several folks in town. Also, it turns out Stephen isn’t just a retired cop, he was the DI on Carys’s case—when Matilda is brought in for questioning about her harassment of Rose’s family, she rightly asks why a former officer is allowed to question her. And on the spooky side, there may or may not be something involving John Dee??? Interesting.
In the last episode, Matilda went way too far in her pursuit of the truth. She went to the local school and started talking to Rose’s son Davy—when Aron showed up and (understandably) flipped out about her hanging around, Matilda wound up shouting, “I’m his sister!” And look, Matilda’s entire life has been turned upside down, and she’s anxious to make sense of it. But she has zero self-awareness about how it might look to turn up at the school as a strange adult talking to one of the kids, in a town that experienced a high-profile missing child case. She does not understand why Rose won’t simply talk to her and believe her, even after Rose lays out just how painful this is:
“After my little girl disappeared, I had people coming to me with information, saying they’d seen her. One idiot even told me that he was the one who took her. They all turned out to be liars or fucking nutcases, but do you know what? I believed every one of them, every one, because I wanted to. I wanted it so much! Do you know how that feels, to be given hope again and again, and then have it smashed every single time?”
Matilda’s being incredibly myopic right now, but while I understand why she doesn’t feel she has space for niceties or patience, her crusade is leaving damage in its wake. The heaviest portion of that damage, of course, goes to Rose, but there’s more to go around. She hooked up with Nick last episode to avoid processing her feelings about the incident at the school, but now she seems dismissive-to-annoyed about his continued overtures. She bursts into Meredith’s home after being explicitly told she couldn’t come in. She’s drawn a lot of people into this investigation and stands to mess up plenty of lives.
That also extends to Hal. Matilda takes his support for granted, assuming she can push him away when she wants and he’ll still turn up to help with whatever she needs. And to an extent, that is true. He goes along with more than he wants to, and he shields her from some of the fallout. But even Hal has his limits. When Matilda convinces him to take her to see Rose yet again, he urges, “Listen. Listen. There was something dodgy going on up at the [estate], I can see that now. But this isn’t gonna help us.” And when he finally puts his foot down, she wants nothing to do with him.
Side note: in addition to Matilda seeming unaware of how much hurt she’s causing with her digging, she also seems to have no qualms about the difference between her and Hal when she ropes him into this stuff. It looks like he’s just about the only Black person in the vicinity, but she doesn’t think about that when it comes to showing up unannounced at a funeral or hanging around outside Rose’s house.
While Hal is still very much in Matilda’s orbit and wants nothing more than to go to bat for her, we see more of him on his own in this episode, which I enjoy. In the last episode, he wound up leaving the estate, telling Matilda, “Look, I’m obviously annoying you. Maybe it’s best if I stay in that pub tonight, give you some space.” This is what puts him in the position to be approached by Trudy in the first place. There’s a great exchange where she asks if he’s a musician, claiming she can tell by his hands.
HAL: “Really?”
TRUDY: “No, of course not, you fool. I googled you.”
HAL: “...Ah. Yeah, no, that’d make more sense.”
Poor Hal—he’s so taken by the notion that Trudy could recognize his musicianship from his hands, then retreats into this sort of self-deprecating air after she tells him the truth. I love everything about how Joel Fry plays this.
Another excellent scene puts Hal in contact with one of the spookier elements in the show, a piece of haunting music. Fry is so good in this long sequence of him trying to sleep as he can’t get the song out of his head, then taking steps to address it. He conveys some nice character work without a single line of dialogue. The whole thing does make me a little worried for Hal, since things haven’t gone well for other characters who’ve heard this music, but I hope his clever way of dealing with it bodes well for him.
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