*Episode premise spoilers*
Season 1 finale time! It’s a great one. Thinking back to my first impressions from the pilot, I’m a little floored by how much I’ve wound up liking the show. The finale suggests big changes potentially going into season 2, and I’m excited to see where they take it!
An elderly client has to run an errand while Ollie and Darren are doing a job—worried that they’ll steal something when he’s out, he decides to lock them in the room where they’re working. With Ollie in a bad mood and Darren feeling claustrophobic, it’s only a matter of time before they’re at each other’s throats. Meanwhile, something major’s going down outside the locked room, but no one can get a hold of them.
We’ll start with the non-Ollie-Darren stuff first. An unexpected complication shows up on Tony’s doorstep, and he does his best to deal with it. Emma and Liz both get roped in to help, but things are even tenser than usual between them after Emma drops a major bombshell. The thing is, although this side of the plot isn’t bad at all, the Ollie-Darren part is so good that the rest of the episode can’t compare. Every time we cut to Tony or Emma and Liz, I was antsy to get back to the guys. But again, it isn’t bad by a long stretch, and there are some fun bits here. I especially like the contentious banter between Emma and Liz over Emma’s driving, and there’s an amusing scene of Tony valiantly trying to meditate.
On a side note, I get a kick out of Tony describing Darren this way: “Big hair, gangly, looks like Lionel Richie.”
Apart from these occasional scenes with the rest of the cast, the Ollie-Darren plot feels almost like a bottle episode. Even before the introduction of the locked door, they’re on rocky ground. As usual, Darren is messing around instead of helping, and when he realizes Ollie doesn’t have any patience for his shit, he starts poking at Ollie’s bad mood. Darren hits Ollie with a barrage of period jokes (my favorite being, “Arsenal playing at home?”), making him more and more annoyed.
This means that, when they get locked in, Ollie has zero sympathy for Darren’s resulting meltdown. I like how this is handled—the show plays it for laughs, but Joel Fry doesn’t, if that makes sense. Darren goes from confused disbelief to panic really fast, banging on the door to be let out, and it’s in stark contrast to the bemused Ollie rolling his eyes at him. While this tonal mismatch makes the scene funny, Darren’s distress is entirely sincere and is played as such. As the client is leaving the house, Darren shouts out the window, “Oi, you can’t lock me in here!! What gives you the right to do that?? I haven’t done anything wrong!! You’re not my dad!!!” By the end of it, he’s screaming and on the verge of tears. That’s one thing I find very interesting about Darren. He’s frequently chill to the point of apathy, and a lot of things just kind of roll off him, but when he does express strong emotions, it’s apparent that he feels them really deeply.
While he’s able to calm down after getting through his initial panic at being trapped, Darren remains on edge throughout the episode. Looking for something to distract him, he gets laser focused on figuring out why Ollie’s so grumpy today. Plenty of his “theories” are jokes at Ollie’s expense—“Is it because you’ve got a teeny nob?”, “Is it because Disney won’t make The Little Mermaid 2?”—but he just won’t let it go, and he accidentally stirs up something that forces the two guys to come to a head.
I sang my praises for Fry’s acting in episode 5 of Requiem, where Hal gets into a big fight with Matilda, and I might love this argument just as much. Both men lash out at one another, and I really like the specific way Darren lashes out. This pent-up emotion is released in kind of a restrained way, like he’s trying to keep holding onto apathy but can’t quite manage it, and while the things he says to Ollie are meant to be hurtful, they reflect that Darren feels hurt as well. “You’re not the boss,” he insists when Ollie tries to lay down the law. “You’re just here because you have to be. You’re a rubbish boss and a rubbish handyman!” Fry’s performance here is completely different than in Requiem, because the two characters are so different, but in both cases, he just knocks it out of the park.
Circling back to a bit earlier in the episode, after Darren’s freakout when he’s mostly just on edge and unhappy, there’s a good scene where it’s revealed that Darren is astoundingly good at I Spy. Ollie is bowled over by it, but really, it makes perfect sense to me. For all that he can be easily distracted and comes across as indifferent a lot of the time, Darren is incredibly observant, about both things and people. This trait actually contributes to his eventual blowup with Ollie, because Darren can tell that Ollie isn’t acting like himself. Ollie is “well anal” about keeping his phone charged, so why is it dead today? Ollie attributes his mood to Darren being “a massive ballbag,” but Darren points out, “Oh, no, I’ve been a ballbag for ages, mate. This is something different.” His observations keep setting off his spidey senses, and once he’s noticed something’s off, he can’t leave it alone.
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