“I’m used to that - losing things I love. I’ve been doing it all my life.” - Kate Ashby
Episode two of Hugo Blick’s series is mostly owned by Michaela Coel’s Ashby, who gets to show all the facets of her complex, prickly, vulnerable character - resourceful, mordant, lacking in social filter, terrified. But for all of her tough carapace, not only is she groping in the dark for much of this episode but she as yet doesn’t quite realise just how much in the dark she truly is. And her sense of loneliness is exacerbated by the shocking, grisly highlight of the episode.
First up, we’re at The Hague. Godwin Hall, Eve Ashby’s assistant is looking round the empty courtroom. A somewhat sinister usher, standing behind the thick glass of the public gallery above him, tries to impress upon him the grandeur of the place. “Impressive, isn’t it?” he asks. “Depends who wins,” shrugs Godwin.
The court is in session. By now, we’ve guessed that an attack is in the offing. Two men pass through security; at the moment the x-ray machine picks up their guns, a woman nearby conveniently vomits violently, distracting the staff, allowing them to walk through unmolested. They take their place in thew public gallery as Eve Ashby announces to the judge that she intends to submit evidence about Nyamoya outside of the court’s mandate but which will establish a “predisposition of character” on his part. It’s contained in a package; “The one thing he thought we’d all forget”, she tells Nyamoya’s team.
The two men are joined unexpectedly in the gallery by a school party. The younger man blinks nervously; their assassination mission is aborted. They get back in the car with their driver, the older man castigating his partner for his squeamishness. A highway patrol officer watches their car pass by.
Outside the court room, Eve and Godwin happen to set eyes on Nyamoya as he is standing in a holding cage waiting to be driven away. They exchange words and it seems like we’re about to learn something; “my daughter deserves -” when a shot rings out and Eve is hit. The highway patrol officer is an assassin. Nyamoya is handcuffed, trapped - he is shot dead where he stands. The gunman kills Godwin also. It’s not Bodyguard-shocking, but shocking all the same to lose a character like Harriet Walter’s so early. And dead she is - we are not spared the brain parts nestling in the puddle of blood oozing from her head.
Numb yet composed in her grief at the morgue, Kate reveals to the mortician that though her mother still wears her wedding ring, her father died a long time ago. A news item reveals the aftermath of the shooting, with the two would-be assassins and their driver now added to the bodycount, dispatched by the same man, Mr Plan B, who killed Eve and Nyamoya.
Following a call to Eunice Taylor in the US, Alice Munezero, former general in the Tutsi army, arrives in the UK for Eve’s funeral. She knows Michael well, it seems - they meet at the bedside of Michael’s daughter but the story of how they met they tell Harper feels concocted. Alone, they converse obliquely. “So - is it all set up?” asks Alice.
At Eve’s funeral, Kate delivers a gauche, blunt eulogy in which she says that Eve was “not my mother”. She meant to convey “more than that” but it doesn’t quite come across and Alice wonders to Michael if she is entirely reliable. Later, Alice and Kate meet and she hands him a copy of a photo of her, Michael, Even and her father Ed, who we learned died in a plane crash a week after rescuing Kate from the orphanage. Shortly afterwards, Alice is met by police and arrested. She has been expecting them. This is what had been set up.
In the back of a car, Kate pops tablets as Michael looks on sympathetically. He drinks, a lot, he reveals. We later see him piss blood. He tells a confused Kate that to her mother, Nyamoya was not the national hero he seemed but that maybe she saw prosecuting him as a “destination, not a bridge”. Kate is further shocked, as is the British judge, when Alice agrees to be extradited to France on a war crimes charge - killing a French priest. Michael explains to Kate that she just wants to get the case sorted once and for all but it’s like he’s holding something back, even as it’s clear he wants to take Kate more under his wing - each a replacement father/daughter to the other.
After Alice appears before a French magistrate, Kate is dispatched to meet the witnesses, as well as one Jacques Barré, advisor to the Elysée Palace in the run-up to 1994, whose family made their pile in rubber. It was he who encouraged the dead priest’s mother to seek a prosecution. He refuses to apologise for advising the French to back the “democratically elected” Hutu government and has no qualms about apportioning some blame for the genocide on the minority Tutsis and their invading army. Kate is visibly offended.
She makes two further calls - on the Hutu doctor at the refugee camp, who she tricks into giving her the number of his contact, a member of the French Secret Service. When she visits the second witness, the Tutsi lieutenant, at a compound, he gives her short shrift and warns that if she knows about the secret service officer, he will know about her.
Shortly afterwards, she takes a swim at her hotel pool, only for an unseen hand to trigger the automatic shutter, trapping her in the water; she only just escapes alive. Back in the changing room, she slithers through an air vent in search of her assailant, only to hallucinate - an animated sequence in which a hand reaches down and rescues her - dropping back into the changing room where the word “STOP” has been written into the condensation on the shower door.
Notes and observations
It would be remiss not to mention the theme tune to the show - You Want It Darker by Leonard Cohen, the title track of his last album, was recorded in often excruciating pain and in the knowledge of his probably impending demise.
After Keeley Hawes’ home secretary and now Harriet Walter’s Eve is there a “no one is safe” edict at the BBC’s drama department?
Despite claiming to be anathema to men, it’s confirmed tonight, as suspected from their encounter last week, that Kate had an affair with the (married) Godwin.
Lovely symmetrical dialogue tonight. Nyamoya’s last words to Eve; “it doesn’t matter - they already know”, mirrored by Michael’s assurance to Kate about her mother, who missed her last message from Kate saying she loved her; “It doesn’t matter - she already knew.”
