Spoiler alert: this recap is published after Happy Valley airs on BBC One in the UK. Do not read on if you haven’t watched episode three.
By ’eck, Sarge, what an enthralling hour of TV. The series reached its midway mark with little green men and large trouserless ones. Here’s your team briefing on the third episode …
Table for two by the window
Last week climaxed with Sgt Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) confronting her sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran) about the betrayal over the prison visits. Here, we were flung straight back to that Sheffield cafe. Clare’s “moderately interesting-looking sandwich” turned to dust in her mouth as Catherine simmered with rage about her secretly taking her grandson Ryan (Rhys Connah) to see Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) in the nearby Category-A clink (actually HMP Wakefield, as spotted by eagle-eyed commenters).
Catherine’s righteous fury was all the more potent for being expressed in hushed tones. As tears rolled down her cheeks, she listed Tommy’s heinous crimes against the family. Clare, a bundle of guilt, was soon crying, too. Who needs stunts, CGI or exotic locations when you’ve got Sally Wainwright’s script and two actors at the top of their game?
It emerged that Ryan had been writing to his incarcerated biological father since he was 10, but only in the past year had Bad Jesus – recently transferred to Sheffield – been able to pass a message to his son, via an ex-con. Ryan had then asked Clare’s boyfriend, Neil Ackroyd (Con O’Neill), to escort him on a prison visit. “Soft, weak” Neil had agreed, which Catherine later speculated could be linked to him losing access to his own teenage children due to alcoholism. When Neil confessed all to Clare after the first visit, she had tried to put a stop to it, but Ryan had a meltdown, never having been told the full extent of Tommy’s monstrousness.
Clare had accompanied them the next time, to reassure herself there was nothing untoward going on – apart from a multiple murderer manipulating an impressionable teenager, that is – and consequently allowed the trips to continue. She naively believed it wasn’t just a journey of self-discovery for Ryan, but could also help rehabilitate Tommy.
She begged the bewildered, blazing Catherine not to let it come between them. Fat chance. What a devastating scene that 11-minute two-hander was. Baftas and Café Amico carrot cake all round.
Center Parcs: Spanish Branch
Beaming, bouncing and calling him “buddy”: Tommy was so visibly thrilled by Ryan’s visit that it was almost sweet. Does he have some hold or leverage over Neil? He certainly spoke like he did, brusquely ordering the flaky third wheel to “go and get the tea and biscuits”. When Neil mentioned Catherine’s name and Tommy bridled, he sheepishly apologised. Not just weak; positively cowed.
Tommy advised Ryan to stand up to bullies (the irony), asked him to come to his impending murder trial (how wholesome) and hatched pipe-dream plans to go skydiving or bungee jumping together someday. Neil posited that such pie-in-the-sky ideas were “self-kidology” to keep him going during his lifelong sentence. Or was he planning to escape abroad with Ryan and make them reality? Alexa, what’s Spanish for bungee?
‘Who’s rattled your cage, grandmother?’
When Catherine stormed out of the cafe, swearing under her breath, she saw a brief, haunting vision of her daughter, Becky, who killed herself 15 years ago. She gasped, winded by grief, before banging her head on a shop window to banish such thoughts and striding off. Never underestimate the power of a no-nonsense mam on a mission.
She confided in her ex-husband, Richard (Derek Riddell), about how she had planned to tell Ryan about “that shitpot” when he turned 18 and let him make his own choices, while making clear it was her or Tommy. Now, she gave him the same ultimatum two years early. In the meantime, Ryan sofa-surfed at Clare and Neil’s – an arrangement that couldn’t last in their bijou flat with noisy neighbours. Endearingly, Ryan’s best mate, Cesco (Freddy Smith), said he could move in with him. Well, until his mother swiftly kiboshed the idea: “No bloody way!”
During a doorstep handover, Catherine explained that Tommy had a “a kink in his brain, a psychological deformity” but it wasn’t “necessarily hereditary”. Reassuring herself as much as Ryan, you felt. She stopped short of telling him how his mother had died, let alone why, but Ryan soon had the former confirmed by Clare. A lovely human touch how, even amid such a momentous chat, they broke off for brief chats about gaming and his tea going cold. “What you having?” “Stew.” “That’ll be all right.”
The ripples from Ryan’s prison visits soon spread. PC Ann Gallagher (Charlie Murphy) – whom Tommy “abducted, terrorised and raped for the best part of a week” in series one – was seriously shaken and having flashbacks to her ordeal. “Shit timing,” with her starting her CID secondment the next day. Her father, Nevison (George Costigan), and her partner, Daniel (Karl Davies), rallied around. Is it too shallow to mention how their period pile looks a stunner? [Googles property prices in Calder Valley.]
Caught with his trousers down
Remember the woman who fell to her death from a fourth floor window last week? We learned that she was 28-year-old Danielle, who was registered blind and trying to escape from her own flat. Gangsters had used it to stash dirty money; when Danielle had realised, they had locked her in the bedroom and kept her hostage for weeks. When she made a desperate bid for freedom, the captor who had posed as her boyfriend, Josip (Anthony Skrimshire), was caught on CCTV leaving with two rucksacks – presumably as much of the cash as he could carry. CID had his address under observation and prepared to swoop.
Except they weren’t the only ones. Enforcers Ivan (Oliver Huntingdon) and Matija (Jack Bandeira) had recruited Josip. Now their boss, Viktor (Anthony Flanagan), said “the chief” (presumably the “respectable businessman” Darius Knezevic) had ordered them to kill Josip “before the Feds get to him”. Cue Line of Duty-esque convoy scenes as police and gangsters converged on the same address.
The Feds won the race. Josip fled into the loft, climbed through to next door and fled, Catherine gave chase, grappling him on the ground when he tripped. As his trousers fell down farcically, Josip bloodied her nose with his elbow. “Fuck you, buster,” snarled Catherine, channelling all her frustration into two wince-inducing punches before arresting him for false imprisonment and money laundering. As Ivan and Matija watched aghast, Catherine spotted them circling the block and noted down their licence plate.
Either they or Josip had been on the take. There had been £70,000 in the flat. Police found only £40,000. “Man, we are fucking dead,” muttered Matija. Talking of which …
From Mr Bean to Dr Death
As predicted by his abused wife, Joanna (Mollie Winnard), last week, PE teacher Rob Hepworth (Mark Stanley) flipped from bad cop to good cop by offering Ryan a shoulder to cry on. Across town, Jo – bearing fresh bruises again – and permaflustered pharmacist Faisal Bhatti (Amit Shah) pressed “go” on their plot to kill Rob. If the clumsiness with which Faisal snuck around to see his partner-in-crime was any indication, stumbling and bumbling like the world’s worst ninja, it wouldn’t exactly be the perfect murder. So it proved.
The pair hatched a plan for Jo to drug her husband’s Friday night drink. Once he was unconscious, Faisal would inject a fatal air bubble into his bloodstream, then drive the corpse to Huddersfield’s red light district in Rob’s car and dump it at a roadside, making it look as if he had drunkenly gone kerb-crawling and met his end.
Shit got a bit too real for Jo, who back-pedalled and admitted she had lied. Rob didn’t know it was Faisal who had been illegally supplying her with diazepam. Faisal was incandescent that she had almost tricked him into murder. As they clashed, he impulsively grabbed a rolling pin from the kitchen counter and bludgeoned her. Anyone else reminded of Adeel Akhtar and Joanna Froggatt in Sherwood?
As Jo lay twitching on the floor, Catherine left an answerphone message about the lab analysis results on the seized pills, further spooking Faisal. “Shit timing” again. He produced a syringe to finish off poor Jo. Her husband would be prime suspect. Not only had Catherine seen evidence of coercive control, but Hepworth had told Ryan “my marriage isn’t a happy one”. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.
Line of the week
“What a fucking mess” – Clare’s pithy summary of the family situation.
Notes and observations
Was the subplot about UFO sightings merely comic relief, or might those strange lights in the sky prove significant? Drug-runners or people-traffickers, perhaps?
Last week’s episode was scheduled against ITV’s Prince Harry interview, beating it in the ratings by more than a million. Yorkshire 1, Sussex 0.
The emotional tête-à-tête between Catherine and Richard culminated in him apologising for leaving her 15 years ago. Never too late for a reconciliation …
Just me, or was Catherine’s civilian colleague Joyce (Ishia Bennison) looking over her shoulder at the lab report with a little too much interest? Bent or nosy?
Ivan has twice mentioned his imminent wedding – the day after Tommy’s court date in Leeds. There are rarely wasted details in Wainwright scripts.
Will Ryan really choose psycho-dad over robo-gran? Is the net closing on the Knezevic crime empire? Will Lakeland see a spike in sales of marble rolling pins? Please share your thoughts and theories below.
