News

“Scott and Bailey” recap (3.7-8): A Drive to the Ocean

There was a double billing of Scott and Bailey this week, with the final two episodes of the season airing on Wednesday and Thursday nights. I feel I could write a book about each one, so I’ll do my best to contain this. But lord, are there just a lot of feels.

While there was an episodic mystery in Episode 7, the main things that are important to know are: 1) Janet and Rachel are fighting in a way they’ve never fought before and everything is horrible, and 2) We find out the identity of the mole who’s been leaking information about the Helen Bartlett case to the press throughout the series.

Let’s examine:

1) Rachel’s downward spiral has basically become unstoppable. She’s told Sean that after being married for a hot second, she just can’t do it. But he’s still living in her flat and things seem not completely settled and generally weird. She’s been sleeping at Janet’s (OBVIOUSLY), which pleases Janet’s daughters but begins to ruffle her mother’s feathers. It’s a full house of estrogen.

Until one night when Rachel gets especially pissed and brings home Kevin for loud sexytimes. Yeah, Kevin! Office doofus Kevin! Janet arrives home to find her daughter standing at the top of the stairwell, looking “as if she’d seen a ghost,” trying to get away from her former hero’s moans and gasps. Clearly, Janet be ticked, and an absolutely horrible row ensues between her and Rachel in Janet’s car, wherein they say the type of cruel things you only say when you are really, really angry or really, really depressed.

It’s also the type of fight you can’t easily make up from the next day, and their division continues throughout Episode 7 and for most of Episode 8, even getting to the point where Rachel starts talking trash about Janet to other co-workers, which is awful, and both of them act like they can’t believe they were ever friends in the first place. As if “friends” even covers what their relationship actually is.

We’re thrown a bone though in a hilarious scene in Episode 7 where they’re forced to share a car ride for work. After a short and nasty exchange where Janet makes it clear she’s not going to speak to Rachel unless she has to, she then turns on the radio which hilariously blares the Wannadies “You and Me Song,” which is that song from the Romeo & Juliet soundtrack which goes, “You and me always – AND FOREVER!” Rachel casts the radio a disgruntled look.

While this mini-breakup is heartbreaking in its own right, what really gets me down is Rachel herself in this story arc. She’s never been very discriminating in who she shags, of course, and so I’m not necessarily disgusted that she got it on with Kevin or anything. But I’ve always liked to think of her as a character who can’t be tied down, who needs to have independence and wants to have a lot of sex with whomever she wants, all because that’s simply who she is – a female character on TV that represents the women who don’t need (or want) to have the loyal partner and the house and kids. But this season, these sexual trysts are all clearly done simply because she’s a mess. When she admits everything she’s done to Sean in Episode 7, she also essentially tells him that there’s no one who hates her more than herself.

And maybe we’ve always known that, and maybe it’s just that Janet’s love for her has helped balance that, and without Janet’s love, things just really bottom out. But it seems hard to take.

Speaking of the office doofus, the mole is totally Kevin. What? I know! I don’t think anyone saw that one coming, ever. Even though Gill forbids anyone to have contact with him after they’ve compiled damning evidence against him, Rachel meets with him to find out why. Basically, Kevin feels like everyone in the unit thinks he’s a dumbass, especially Gill. This bitterness built up to the point where, when a journalist started prying him for information and made him feel interesting and important, he couldn’t help himself. What really grosses me out about this is that while Kevin, even now, seems to view this whole thing as somehow getting back at his co-workers and superiors, he doesn’t appear to have a shred of guilt about who snitching to the press really hurt, and hurt deeply, as we’ll see: Helen Bartlett.

He’s also, unsurprisingly, convinced that he and Rachel really are made for each other after their bout of lovemaking. Because as he says, they’re both the screwups of the joint and hence soulmates. Rachel says he’s wrong, and sums it up perfectly: “I’m a fuck up. You’re a twat.” Still, this whole thing also bums me out on the other hand because, well, I enjoyed his twattiness. He was often the sole comedic relief in what can be a very depressing place. No one likes seeing part of the family dissolve.

Episodes 6 and 7, by the way, were also written by Amelia Bullmore, Miss Gill herself, and they were just as smashing as Sally Wainwright episodes. All of which leads me to believe that I probably have a crush on Amelia Bullmore.

But anyway, if you think Rachel and Janet not speaking and Kevin being a selfish douche are downers, just wait for Episode 8! We return to the very first scene of this series, with Gill taking a trip to Costco to buy goods for her son Sammy’s engagement party that evening. We see the scene more fleshed out now, though: Helen Bartlett driving into the parking lot after Gill, somewhat nervously and clumsily climbing into her backseat with a clunky blue bag, and then waiting for the moment Gill gets off her cell phone to throw the belt around her neck. It’s after she’s latched it securely that she also brings out that ginormous, shiny knife.

Interestingly, Gill and Helen have never met. But Helen’s seen Gill on TV, and believes her to be the One in Charge for her ruined life. It’s not just the fact that she was charged with the unlawful burial crime, but in the whole shitstorm of things, she’s lost her job, people say ignorant things to her everywhere she goes, and kids throw bags full of shit at her as she walks down the street. On top of that, her girlfriend with the lovely neon hair has left her. Helen’s spent her life trying to get away from the horror of her childhood, but now that she finally helped the police learn about that horror, everything she’s built has been taken away from her. If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that Helen Bartlett’s life is the absolute worst.

Gill, for her part, stays in DCI mode as best she can, attempting to talk Helen down and figure out what she’s thinking. I almost snorted when, with her neck constrained and a knife at her head, she calmly informs Helen, “You haven’t thought this through.” And my heart broke when she tells Helen that she wants to help her, and that she believes she CAN help her, she really can. But Helen is way past the point of believing in the police.

Gill continues to try to get Helen to talk, even after she gets hit roughly in the head with the blunt side of the knife. There are brief moments when she loses her cool, when she shouts, “I want to know where we’re going!,” and when, after being perfectly honest with Helen’s questions previously, she pauses for a second when Helen asks her son’s name. She then says, “John.” I can’t think of a good reason for this lie, other than Gill’s starting to feel a bit nervous, and perhaps believes that she’ll actually break down if she has to say the name of her son that she loves so much out loud.

Part of me just wants to transcribe the entire ride to the ocean–because that is where Helen is instructing Gill to go–which is perfectly paced and lasts for almost the entire episode. But even the dialogue alone wouldn’t capture it completely, while the dialogue is brilliant. You both sympathize with Helen’s pain and are terrified for Gill. The suspense is spot on. And the acting is outstanding. It is a literal perfect hour of television worthy of all the awards.

Luckily, a bystander has also witnessed Gill driving by her on the road with a knife to her throat and called it in, so the team is on it almost immediately. Best of all, DSI Julie Dodson is on the case, and do I love when Pippa Haywood shows up on the screen! There are almost too many shipping possibilities on this show to count, but my absolute favorite, even more than Scott and Bailey themselves, is Gill Murray and Julie Dodson. Just like Gill, Dodson is all business at the command center, jumping into action immediately, but you can just almost see, or at least perfectly sense, her constant panic underneath, her constant rage, her constant devotion to Gill and terror at the possibility of losing her.

They bring in Louise, the ex-girlfriend with the fantastic hair, and she seems just as she has the whole season: both scared and overwhelmed and gentle as a fly. She offers to call Helen as a lead in to handing the phone off to Janet for a negotiation, but Helen hangs up before that’s even possible. But enough time elapses for Louise to let Helen know that the cops are on to her, and to urge her not do this, that they can work something out. Heartbreakingly, she says, “I was struggling, too. I’m sorry.”

But Helen can’t back out of her plan now, which has been revealed as driving off the cliffs into the sea at Flamber Head on the east coast. Like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as she says, but without the flying car. She’s taking Gill with her as a lesson to the world, and to the police, about how they hurt people. And Gill takes her there, right to the edge of the ocean. But there she stops. She tells Helen to do what she has to do. But, “If my son has to hear about how I died, it won’t be because I killed myself.”

Julie Dodson calls in the firing units.

Janet calls Helen again, to let her know she’s surrounded. But Helen is done with talking to the police. She throws the phone in Gill’s lap. Gill scrambles to take it and then lifts it to her face, hands shaking violently, and when she hears Janet’s voice on the other end of the line – the first sure sign she’s had all this time that she’s not alone – I stopped breathing completely.

Helen begins to speak dreamily in the backseat, and Gill tells Janet to wait a moment. She came here when she was nine on a school field trip, Helen did. They looked at birds, and the lighthouse. It was a moment of pure happiness in a wretched world. She says, “I wanted to stay here, forever.” Her voice cracks: “I certainly didn’t want to go home.”

At this point Gill begins to implore to Helen that she can leave here alive and she will, she will get help, and Gill will admit they made a mistake, and that’s when Helen goes to wipe a tear from her eye and smears blood on her cheek and Gill looks back and there’s blood everywhere, and Helen has finally put that knife to use, and Gill screams and flails and she can’t do anything because her neck is still tied to the seat and she yells at Janet over the phone in a crazed voice to get her an ambulance, now! And the firing squad swoops in and Gill is finally released and when the men ask her if she’s okay, she screams at them, in perfect Gill fashion, as if they are all idiots, “No, I am not OK!”

And Julie Dodson lets out a quivery sigh of relief.

As typically happens upon realization that you could die at any moment, Rachel and Janet finally make up at a pub afterwards. They also get confirmation that Helen Bartlett died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Here’s the question, kids: Is Helen Bartlett’s story the most depressing lesbian storyline ever? Like, of all time? I know this is a big question, since there’s an enormous crop of depressing stories out there; believe me, I know. But. For fuck’s sake. They never show Louise again, but she’s all I can think about. They could have been okay. I like to think they could have been OK.

Gill’s son’s engagement party goes on that night as planned, as Janet suspected. Gill Murray is not one to let a little something like a near death experience interrupt her plans. While Rachel technically wasn’t invited, she comes along with Janet anyway. And when they find Gill on her bed next to a bottle half full of gin, Gill pulls herself up and tells Rachel, “You can crash my parties anytime, kid.” And my heart fills up to bursting.

When Rachel asks if she’s alright, she explains that while she’s had people threaten her life before, she’s never actually watched someone die. Seeing someone actually die is a much different thing than seeing dead bodies. As she tells Rachel, “I’ve seen more dead bodies than you’ve had embarrassing and inappropriate sexual encounters.” While this line is amazing, what’s really telling about this scene is that, in stark opposition to Kevin the Mole, what’s really getting Gill down is not that she could have plummeted into the sea from a cliffside hours earlier, but that Helen Bartlett killed herself. Which is why she screamed at Janet over the phone not to get help for herself, but to get an ambulance for Helen. In the end, they all wanted to help Helen. But sometimes the system just doesn’t work the way it should.

Rachel and Janet then explain that they made up at a pub that afternoon. To which Gill retorts, “What are you doing at a pub in the middle of the afternoon? What do you think this is? Life on Mars?” Aaaand END SCENE.

This is a reference to a sci-fi-y police show that ran on BBC back in 2006, and so I have to admit as an ignoramus on the other side of the ocean (although there was also apparently a version of it that ran briefly on ABC), I didn’t completely get it as much as I’m sure other folks did, but to be honest, it didn’t even matter, because the line was still so amazing. Gill Murray, you are my hero.

Now with Series 3 at a close, the question of a Series 4 is still at hand. Now, when I first finished these episodes, my thoughts went along the line of, “Goddamn this is one of the best shows in life ever I don’t want to wait for more I mean there is going to be more I mean there has to be a million seasons of this probably right?”

So, imagine my shock when I did a bit of research online and came upon this devastating short interview with Suranne Jones (Rachel Bailey) on The Mirror . In it she says, “Series Four hasn’t been commissioned and I haven’t made my mind up yet whether to do another one. The hours are so long and it takes you away from friends and family. When you stop enjoying yourself, it’s time to go.”

To say I’m conflicted about this would be an understatement. Part of me feels that the show is so excellent in every single sense that it would seem crazy to me to want to walk away, although another part of me knows that it’s insane for a fan to presume what’s best for an actor. (Although how we try!) If you don’t enjoy something, fair is fair. It’s not up to us decide. And I can only imagine how exhausting of a role it is; I feel exhausted just watching Rachel Bailey! But it’s still heartbreaking.

My only comfort is that if for some reason this show doesn’t continue, there’s at least three seasons out there of completely solid, female-dominated television gold for people to continue discovering in the future. So I suppose as we wait to see, all I can say is, as always, thanks for everything, Sally Wainwright.

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button