*Note: there isn't a single non-spoilery shot of Hal in this episode, so I'm using a picture from episode 5's fantastic argument scene*
*Spoilers from episode 5*
Here we are at the final episode—I’m still thinking about the ending. For me personally, I don’t think they quite stuck the landing on the resolution, even though there’s still a lot of good stuff going on here. We’ve got great acting, strong character moments, and some nice twistiness.
Okay, big spoilers from episode 5: after discovering some strong evidence that Matilda’s birth certificate is fake and that Janice really did kidnap her, Hal repeatedly tries to get a hold of Matilda as he returns from a fact-finding mission to Manchester. While he’s driving, one of the Thin Ones suddenly appears behind him, and he flips the car. But when Matilda is called to the scene of the accident, Hal is missing.
That’s the situation as we enter the finale. Matilda, worried about Hal, tries to uncover the people controlling the Thin Ones—she thinks she knows who some of them are, and she’s received a message that they’re preparing for their biggest move yet. Desperately, Matilda tries to get PC Graves to believe her and help her stop them.
Obviously, there are a lot of spoilers to avoid here, so I’ll be talking around things a lot. Matilda catches a solitary lucky break in that she’s able to show Graves proof of one small part of the puzzle, earning herself a smidgeon of trust. When Graves admits, “You were right [about this,]” Matilda simply replies, “I’ve been right about a lot of things.” However, the same dogged bulldozer tendencies she’s been displaying throughout the whole miniseries may endanger that fragile trust. When Matilda doesn’t listen to Graves’s directions, when she charges in and grabs people and makes wild accusations, she doesn’t help her case. Her opponents are perpetually calm and appear rational, and she comes off as unstable by comparison.
It’s clear that the conspirators have been feeding into this all along, backing Matilda into corners so she gets more and more desperate. And then what do they do? They throw it back in her face. Matilda confronts one of them about everything she’s lost while trying to solve this mystery, and the conspirator tells her, “No, Matilda. You did it. All those things, you sacrificed them to get to here.” I have very rightly given Matilda grief for how she’s treated people here, but at that icy remark, I feel like she should at the very least get to explode the conspirator with her mind.
Matilda has been periodically seeing visions of Janice since her death, and there’s an excellent scene between the two of them in this episode. Also, shoutout to Brendan Coyle as Stephen, who kept me guessing practically to the end about whether or not I could trust him—even when I was 99.9% sure what the answer was, he’d still give me these moments where I’d get a tiny flicker of, “But maybe…?”
As I said, I’m not sure about the ending. Since I don’t engage much with horror as a genre, it’s possible that I don’t really know my way around the types of resolutions that work as a satisfying horror ending. I just know that, for me, it left me underwhelmed, with a bit of an, “...Oh,” reaction. It’s a shame, because there’s a lot that I like about this miniseries—including some stuff I love!—but a lackluster ending can color my overall opinion of a story.
In the finale, Hal is an important plot point without, unfortunately, being a major presence. He’s only in a few brief scenes, and while he’s effective in them, there’s very little for him to do here. That said, I promise my dissatisfaction with the ending isn’t just about a lack of screen time for Joel Fry! I understand why things shake out the way they do there.
Unfortunately, every bit of Fry’s limited screen time here is quite spoilery, so I won’t really discuss it. Instead, I’ll talk about the ways he remains crucial to the narrative without actually being onscreen for much of the episode. Obviously, the car accident and his disappearance weighs heavily on people’s minds, from Matilda to Trudy to Graves (who’s investigating it.) Trudy regrets the last conversation they had before Hal left for Manchester, and Matilda is determined to help if there’s any hope of saving him—when another character urges her to flee, she insists, “I won’t leave you, and I won’t leave Hal.” (There’s no specific mention of whether Matilda regrets the last conversation she had with Hal before he left, but hopefully she does.) Besides that, the evidence he found is important to the plot, we see Matilda learn why he hadn’t been able to get a hold of her, and there’s a great gut-punch moment when Matilda realizes how many times he tried to call her.
Before I get into my final thoughts, there’s one more thing I have to get off my chest. I found out that back in 2021, the director of this show cast Joel Fry as Capt. frickin’ Wentworth(!!!) in an adaptation of Persuasion that got canceled by the studio after Netflix announced their incredibly shaky version with Dakota Johnson and Cosmo Jarvis! It was going to star Sarah Snook from Succession. Aside from the Joel-Fry-as-a-Jane-Austen-leading-man of it all, that cast pairing is fascinating to me, and even though I’m four years late on this news, I’m in mourning that this film isn’t getting made. Why?!?
Moving along…
Accent Watch
Southern British English.
Recommend?
In General – I think I would. It’s still a good ride, even if I’m not entirely happy with where it goes in the end.
Joel Fry – Yes, yes, yes! Fry’s performance is beautifully nuanced. He does such great work as Hal!
Warnings
Strong thematic elements (including suicide and child abduction,) violence, disturbing images, language, drinking/smoking/drug references, and brief sexual content.
No comments:
Post a Comment