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“Last Tango in Halifax” recap (2.4): Heartbreak Hotel

Last week on Last Tango in Halifax, we saw more affection between Caroline and Kate than we ever have before – but still not enough. We also learned that Gillian didn’t just find her husband after his suicide 10 years ago; she actually helped finish the deed. This wasn’t a huge shock, after the way they have always discussed this tragedy, but Alan has been carrying it around ever since, and is now using it as justification for separating himself slightly from his daughter.

This week’s episode is like a sneak attack of emotion: it starts out relatively light but enjoyable, comfortable, reeling you firmly in. And then the dominoes begin to fall, slowly and then all at once, until you’re left breathless, your chest cracked right open.

The light and enjoyable part, not surprisingly, begins with John. Poor, befuddled, stupid, stupid, John. He’s at Gillian’s, taking care of the baby while Gillian is at work at the grocery store, when Raff comes home from school. Raff seems confused about John’s presence, but is thankful someone’s there to watch Baby No Name while he plays Xbox. Before he can get to the Xbox, though, he shares with John that they haven’t even filled out the papers for the birth certificate yet, which John adamantly implores him to fix right away. Proof of his fatherhood is important. After all, as he says, “The law is weighted massively, ridiculously on the side of the mother.” Seriously. When will society stop to think about the men? John continues: “Listen, I’m talking as someone whose relationship with his children has been really compromised by being married to a mad, manipulative lesbian.” John is hilarious. But apparently Raff is even more hilarious, because he counters, “I thought it was because you had a fling with Judith.”

Well, now that you mention it.

John swiftly ignores this comment. He demands that Raff stand his birth certificate-fatherhood ground right this moment. In fact, he’ll drive him to city hall to do it! They rouse Ellie out of hiding at her parents’ house, and Harry and Maurice round off the group of witnesses, making quite the amusing, motley crew of people that end up sitting around a government desk, bickering about what they are actually going to call Baby No Name.

John has a lot of pretentious, literary ideas, but in the end, they settle on what Alan had been calling her all along: Emily Jane. Although when Raff calls Alan to tell him the news, Alan at first believes he says “Calamity Jane,” which becomes a tiny running joke. Gillian later says she actually prefers Calamity. Calamity sounds like someone who can kick ass. A point I agree with her on.

Over in Harrogate, Caroline gets ready for her mucky weekend with Kate, leaving the boys in the care of Celia and Alan. As Kate and Caroline drive up to the palace hotel, sweet music is playing in the background, and they are dressed casually and gorgeously, relaxed, focused on just themselves, all things we have rarely, if ever, seen before. They stroll the luxuriously British pathway into the grand, historic building, and they are all smiles and happy, glowing faces.

The next time we see Caroline, she’s sitting in a lounge chair in the downstairs of the hotel, waiting for Kate. Her face is still calm, content, beautiful. But beware, dear readers: when Kate eventually sits down across from her, her aura is decidedly different. Always eager Kate is suddenly cold, standoffish. We soon find out why. It appears that Caroline, for silly, insecure reasons, has booked two separate rooms for her and Kate’s “romantic” weekend.

Oh, Caroline. Caroline, Caroline, Caroline. She tries to apologize and make excuses. She keeps saying that all of this “isn’t easy for her,” and that they can still sleep together, and she tells Kate that she looks beautiful. But Kate says that mentally, she is already gone. She was so excited for this weekend, but now she’s no longer even there. She’s only there physically so that she can meet Greg, the old friend who she wants to be her baby daddy, who are they are currently sitting in this hotel waiting for.

Caroline says she panicked when she called to reserve the room. Kate counters that Caroline doesn’t panic. Panic is not who Caroline is. Caroline says that it’s not about Kate, or about them as a couple; it’s about herself. Kate says she’s not falling for her excuses anymore.

And while Kate uses the word “gay” and reports Caroline’s own words back to her -“It’s 2013” – in a normal tone of voice, Caroline has resorted to frantic whispering, accompanied by nervous glances anytime a waiter passes them by. Clearly it was not one moment of panic when she called to make a reservation. Clearly it is a constant state of panic, whenever she and Kate are anywhere outside of their own homes. As Kate tells her: she blew it.

And then Greg shows up.

He joins them for dinner, wherein he and Kate share a great many apparently hilarious stories and memories, while Caroline sits silently in the background and sips wine, her dead eyes only occasionally coming to life to express clear disdain for Greg and for this whole situation.

Eventually, once Greg is away from the table for a moment, Caroline complains about his self-obsessed drivel to Kate. And while this assessment may be true, it’s probably also not the best way to win back over your girlfriend, who clearly considers this man a friend. Caroline excuses herself to her room, although not before casting one long, desperate, frustrated, and sadly confused look back at Kate.

Meanwhile on the farm, Gillian actually seems more put together this episode than she has all season. We make it through almost an entire episode without her sobbing! But drama still manages to find her, unsurprisingly. Everyone’s favorite drunk, Judith Fitch, shows up at Caroline’s house in a rage, looking for John, eventually finding him at Gillian’s. Robbie has also just decided to make amends with Gillian, and so he’s there, too. It’s one little happy group of people who have variously slept with each other, until Judith breaks the news that Gillian and John are included in that category. After some weak attempts at lying and defending, John soon admits the truth. And since John clearly can’t leave well alone, he continues to tell Robbie why, in fact, Robbie’s not good enough for Gillian, and that she doesn’t want him, anyway. Because John has decided that Gillian lacks the ability to speak for herself.

Robbie proceeds to punch John in the face.

In other acts of stupidity and violence, Lawrence and one of his friends have trashed his mother’s beautiful kitchen while she’s away getting her heart broken, drinking too much and acting stupid in the way that teenage boys often drink too much and act stupid.

Celia stumbles upon this scene in disgust, but barely has time to deal with it before learning that William, the Good One, is in outpatients. The only thing we know about William this season is that he has a job that he hates, and after leaving early during this particular shift when he just couldn’t take it anymore, he was then violently mugged after taking cash out of an ATM. Yet instead of feeling anger, it seems that he just feels lonely and hurt. He laments to Alan that he saw it in the muggers, in the faces of the bullies he works with: that they think William is an outsider, a freak, someone who deserves their kicks and laughs. My poor lovely William. I wait all season to see more of you, and when I do, you are sad and broken.

Alan shares a little life lesson with him. The most important thing in life, he says, is confidence. And sometimes, the best way to get confidence is to hang out with people that make you doubt yourself, that make you feel like you are somehow not good enough, and to live through it. And I know Alan Buttershaw and Sally Wainwright didn’t know this, but this is somehow a message that I needed to hear at this exact moment in my life as much as William.

Back at heartbreak hotel, it’s the next morning and Caroline is having tea alone when Kate walks up to her table, saying she got Caroline’s text. A text isn’t the only way Caroline’s tried to reach her: she came back downstairs last night, but Kate and Greg had already gone. And when she knocked on Kate’s door two separate times, she received no answer. Greg had decided to stay the night, and Kate had been in his room instead, sharing a night cap. Caroline is clearly annoyed and gives another hurried apology, but continues to say that if they’re going to raise a baby, it can’t be with Greg. “He’s a jerk.” Kate’s face remains set and aloof, countering, “He’s one of my oldest friends.” You are driving the nail deeper and deeper, Caroline.

And then, Caroline sighs and says she’s giving up on the idea of buying out John’s portion of her house. This is off topic, and another bad move. She isn’t just ignoring matters at hand by deflecting, she’s also reacting to being hurt. She’s not casually talking about real estate. If she’s not going to buy John out, then it’s implied that maybe Kate doesn’t need to sell her house, after all. Kate says that all the house business was never for the right reasons in the first place. “You don’t want what’s best for me. You never did. You want what’s best for you, all the time.” A moment later, Kate continues this thought, making what may have been perceived as just a fight now decidedly much more. “You’re too old to change. I think it’ll always be about you.” Caroline responds that it isn’t true, but it’s a little weak, maybe because she thinks Kate’s right, maybe because she can tell Kate is already tumbling out of her grasp. After a beat, Caroline asks, “Are you dumping me?”

Kate replies, “No, I don’t think so,” and for a tiny sliver of a moment, our hearts cheer for a second. Maybe this IS something they can work out. But no, the reason that she’s not dumping Caroline is because there wasn’t ever really any relationship to begin with. It was just “a bit of embarrassed fumbles; an odd mess.” Kate’s evaluation is overly harsh, meant to hurt, as she is hurt. And then she adds: “Which is a shame. Because I would have done absolutely anything for you.”

Caroline’s mouth is slightly ajar, her eyes hard to read, as if in sluggish but gradual comprehension. She starts a sentence about how this weekend was supposed to be, a sentence that never gets finished, as Kate steps in to respond that she knows exactly how this weekend was supposed to be. She’ll be continuing her second night’s stay, with Greg instead of Caroline. But Caroline blew it before Greg even arrived, so, don’t go blaming it on him. When Caroline says one last time, as if her brain doesn’t know what else to say, that this is hard for her, Kate says that it’s hard for everyone. She tells Caroline to grow up. And then, Kate leaves.

In case our souls weren’t gutted enough by this painfully disastrous weekend at the hotel, there’s more grief left in store for us in the last 10 minutes of this wonderful, horrible episode. Gillian gets a call at her house from Harry which prompts her to talk to Celia over the phone, asking if she can deliver some bad news to her dad in person. Celia says solemnly, of course, love. She leads Alan away from the breakfast table, asks him to sit down. She looks at him sadly and says simply, “Maurice is dead.”

A stroke, they think. Neighbors found him at the bottom of the stairs. And dear Alan Buttershaw’s jolly face immediately switches to a trembling jaw, watery eyes, slowly taking in a few quiet, pained breaths.

Gillian is full of tears, too, over the man her dad knew since they were small children, that she had known her entire life, good ol’ Uncle Maurice. The tears stream down her face freely at the funeral, as Alan speaks about his best friend.

He says the one thing he regrets is that he never got to ask Maurice to be his best man at his wedding. Later at the pub, Alan reckons that, in light of this regret, maybe they should have a wedding–again. But this time, they’ll invite everyone. Welcome to Series Two of Last Tango in Halifax: the Marriage that Never Ends.

To wrap up the Kate and Caroline heartache, Caroline sums it all up to her mom upon returning home, in the saddest line of all the sad lines of this episode: “I’m just no good at things, sometimes.”

A week later, Caroline enters a room at school where Kate is just finishing up collecting students’ work. Caroline asks if she and Greg have gone ahead with Kate’s plans. Kate says they have. Caroline says, “Well.” Kate says, curtly, that she’s done with her work in the classroom, and so she’s going to leave it. She breezes past Caroline without even a goodbye.

I believed I had already seen more sad Caroline eyes than should be legal in the span of an hour, but we’re left with one final whammy. My heart, it hurts for them both.

What do you think of Caroline and Kate’s current status? Is Kate being too harsh? Is there any hope at all in their future?

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