If after four episodes of Happy Valley’s final season you still have no idea how it is going to finish, you are in good company. Not even the cast knows how things are going to pan out, thanks to multiple endings having been filmed.
Speaking on the Obsessed With … Happy Valley podcast, Amit Shah, one of the show’s stars, admitted to being kept in the dark about what will happen to his character. “I still don’t know how it all ends up for him,” says the actor, who plays the dodgy pharmacist Faisal Bhatti. “We filmed the final scenes in various different ways.”
This series of the thriller, set in West Yorkshire, has won praise for the explosive scenes in its fourth episode, which ramps up the potential for conflict between Hebden Bridge’s finest, Sgt Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), and all-round horror Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton).
The Guardian’s recap of the episode described the episode as “unbearably tense”. Fans include Lorraine Kelly, who used a segment about good sleeping habits on her ITV morning show to urge viewers not to watch the series before going to bed. “I couldn’t get to sleep for thinking about it,” she said. “It was such a brilliant hour of episode.”
While the ending is a secret known to only a handful of people, Happy Valley was always planned as a three-season tale, thanks to an agreement between Lancashire and the show’s award-winning writer, Sally Wainwright. “She [Lancashire] knows when enough is enough,” Wainwright told the Guardian in December. “So we planned it as a three-parter and I’m really pleased we stuck to that. You know, with some shows it’s like: [gasp] is it the last one? Then they end on a dumb, nonsense cliffhanger. But this is very clearly the end of the story.”
Happy Valley is on BBC One at 9pm on Sundays and is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
