So here we are. The last hurrah. The swansong. The final countdow – oh, let’s just get on with it.
Yes, it’s the season finale, and an extra-long episode more packed than the 7.30 from Woking to Waterloo. Tonight, three important characters confront who they have been these past months, none of them happy with what they find. But it is the choices they make afterwards that define them.
We open in mild jeopardy. Rowdy crowds have attacked a fellow European club and an English woman has been shot. The “terrorists” had taken umbrage at the sign preventing natives and dogs from entry. Shimla’s ruling class have assembled – a convocation of fuddy-duddy bald men and their wives – and vote to lift the colour bar at Coffin’s Royal Club to prevent similar reprisals. Cynthia would rather have norovirus at her club than non-whites, but doesn’t get a say, for perhaps the first time ever.
The Viceroy hasn’t bothered making a decision on whether to commute Ramu Sood’s sentence or recommend he hang – he’s been too busy buffing up his ivory tricycle or something. So the decision has fallen to Ralph. “What would you do?” he asks Aafrin, who replies that he couldn’t take a life. “Other people do that,” scoffs Ralph. “I just sign a letter.” I know I’ve compared Ralph to various ranks of the Nazi party throughout these recaps, but he’s making it too easy now.
Sepulchral, cell-based horseplay for Sood, who is making fatalistic cracks about his imminent death. Ian, who hasn’t abandoned hope, tries to cheer his friend up by getting on top of the malnourished man and forcing him to wrestle. I’m not sure he understands how prison visits work. The guards don’t think so either – they haul him off and give Sood another beating. It’s crap being Ramu Sood.
Farewell tea for the Raworths. Dougie is off his scones, as is Matthew, who thanks to Ralph has a one-way ticket back to Blighty. Sarah is in an odd mood: happy about returning home and the scones, sad that her marriage is irreparably shattered. “I shall have to get used to doing things alone, shan’t I?” says Dougie, talking about buttering scones, but also his new life. “I expect you’ll get help,” replies Sarah, offering him some acid with his tea.
Their final goodbye is beautifully played, though. “I wish I could have given you what you need,” says Doug. “You did, once or twice. You just never knew it,” replies Sarah, before trundling out of Shimla. Fiona Glascott has handled her character’s brittle fury and humiliated soul brilliantly throughout, and this is a fitting end, if that’s what it is. As for Sarah, I’m glad she’s gone because she was a hornet in a bonnet.
Dougie features in the other standout scene tonight. As the only character immune to Ralph’s suavity, it makes sense that Ralph seeks him out to confess. He admits he is Adam’s father. Despite his antipathy to Ralph, Dougie is relieved to talk semi-openly about poor, self-harming Adam, his own anger at himself and Sarah’s unhappiness in Shimla. “You try to be the man they want,” falters Ralph, and Dougie nods. These men who could not be more different – the Yorkshireman splitting logs and the Machiavelli in the white suit – come to a moment of mournful communion for the women they have failed.
But we haven’t even really got going yet. The drama ramps up a gear when Ralph’s trusted servant Bhupi hangs himself. Yes, I know, who? Why? What fresh mystery is this? It is resolved pretty quickly, because it is the final episode. Sweet-natured Bhupi killed Jaya. Not at Ralph’s behest, but out of misguided loyalty. A shocked Aafrin and Ralph rescue him, the latter making tender promises in Hindi to look after him, cradling him, the way he cradled Jaya.
Characters speak to us most when they try to change. Ralph has spent this episode like a man in search of baptism, trying to start again, save himself. Then again, saving himself is what comes naturally: every scene in which he comes clean ends on another manipulative note. He puts Bhupi to bed, soothing: “We have to forget it and go on, very quietly, or it will be hard for me.” To maintain a central character’s ambiguity so long is testament to the skilfully nuanced portrayal by Henry Lloyd-Hughes. Maybe I’ll stop calling him Donovan from The Inbetweeners now.
Given this noose – sorry, news – Aafrin requests clemency for Sood, perhaps even that he be released in a year. You know, what with being completely innocent and all. Ralph agrees, and promises to run the letter of leniency over himself. Gee, I sure hope he remembers to do that!
No, of course he doesn’t. Instead he gets up early to deliver the letter recommending Sood be publicly hanged, immediately. He’s just that sort of guy.
Sood is led to the gibbet and hanged before a mildly interested crowd and a sobbing Ian. The last person he sees is Cynthia, waving him a sarcastic salute before his neck is snapped, like a Roman emperor sending a gladiator to death. I hope your club burns down, Coffin, and the ground marked in perpetuity as an open urinal for dogs and Indians. Still, I have to keep reminding myself that this is fiction, and Indian Summers has definitely given us a Julie Walters we’ve never seen before. Top marks.
The death is a reckoning, which helps the living see themselves clearer. Sooni spits in her brother’s face, calling him a coward, which perhaps he has been. Ralph has ultimately chosen self-protection over his soul. Dougie honours his absent wife by denying himself present happiness with Leena. He will devote his life to the missionary school and children, living in righteous torment. Realising the breadth of Ralph’s malignity, Aafrin seeks out Sergeant Singh and lets him know he is ready to join the revolution.
We’re not quite done – never let it be said that McLeod knows when to let things go. He is determined to turn the episode into an Ealing comedy, sneaking into the police station to steal what he thinks are Sood’s ashes, but which are actually bone-mash for Superintendent Rowntree’s roses. He even throws in a touch of Bourne, stealing one officer’s cudgel to bash sergeant Singh on the bonce and make good his escape. Sergeant Singh doesn’t feel pain, silly!
Alice finds him on a country road, being led by children, no idea where he’s going, cheerfully deranged by grief. “Come with us if you like,” Ian calls. She does, because following a man holding a box of ashes into a wood for a trip of indeterminate length sounds like a right laugh. Extraordinarily, a mob of natives has formed to honour Ian, their new folk hero. They hoist him on their shoulders, shouting Sood’s name. It’s lovely, though slightly reminiscent of the Ewoks carrying C-3PO around in Return of the Jedi because they thought he was a god.
Comradeship don’t come for free. Singh has challenged Aafrin to steal an effect of Ralph’s to demonstrate commitment. In Ralph’s study, Aafrin locates by chance Adam’s letter, naming Rakshash, his devil-father. He has got a nose for documents that could destabilise regimes, I’ll give him that. But he is not going to be anyone’s patsy again: he hands Singh instead a letter opener, keeping the letter. I guess they are even now. And Aafrin, crucially, still has cards to play. He is an avenging double agent now, codename SHINYSHOES. I like new Aafrin.
Cynthia, generous to a racist fault, consents to allow one native member at her club, and wouldn’t you know, Aafrin gets the nod. In a moving scene, he invites his Anglophile Bapi to drink with him, in his medals; the residents greet them with a reception as chilly as the ice in the drinks they won’t serve them. They are not to know Aafrin is now a viper in their bosom. The apolitical Parsi has become a rebel with a cause.
And we’re almost done. This series has enjoyed a hell of a turnaround. From great expectations to snoozefest to firecracker, it has more than delivered. Ignore the distracting £14m price tag – this has turned into one of the most thrilling shows on TV. And I’ve enjoyed recapping it. Thanks for all your thoughts, cockamamie theories about Alice and Aafrin being replicants, and whatnot. It’s like our own Club, except everyone’s welcome, and I bloody love dogs.
Anyway, a second series has been commissioned; I hope they hit the ground running. These characters are starting to get really interesting – and the concept of milk punch has still not been properly explained.
In the final scene, Cynthia and a damned Ralph have a rapprochement in the garden, doomed to each other. “You’re all I’ve got,” he tells her. “Yes,” she growls back, quite pissed. “Good point.” They ascend the stairs together. The establishment has shored up its power, everyone rightfully restored to their wrong place. But there are faultlines, visible and invisible: McLeod without, a Braveheart without portfolio, and Aafrin within, a civil servant who’s feeling neither civil nor servile. When the tremors come, these are the fissures that will surely split Shimla wide open.
Creasing up
“Who wants a taste of the firing squad?” is what Ralph says when he wants his employees to play cricket with him. Like a 1930s equivalent of “Welcome to the gun show.” Top bantz from Donovan from The Inbetweeners. (I SAID MAYBE.)
Singh-le, NSOH, seeks similar
Singh is like a be-turbaned Terminator. “When did last you see a man run like that,” he asks Aafrin, with absolutely no vocal inflection whatsoever. I hope next series they engineer a situation in which he has to steal someone’s clothes, boots and motorcycle.
They grow up so slowly
Coffin has a bad week (“I went to the hanging today. I thought it might do me good”). Her nadir is surely being spoonfed rice congee by Kaiser in a high chair, like a six-month-old racist infant.
As a youth he wept in butcher’s shops
Ronnie Keane is one of the more boring characters, but I did enjoy him divulging: “I have a horror of any sort of broth.” Perhaps they should explore this Uncle Monty-ish side to his character?
They’ll always have Mas Dam
“Do you remember, sir?” asks Aafrin fondly, handing Ralph a memorandum on the Mas Dam project, as though it’s a photo of them in Paris 20 years ago. Unless they’re saying maasdam, and are actually planning a cheeseboard.
They don’t serve it in half measures
Maybe milk punch is a metaphor for white violence? “After political emancipation, a country’s psyche can spend far longer recovering from the milk punch of colonialism.” What? I should keep these theories to myself?
