The Viceroy is returned! To be honest, we hadn’t realised he was missing, because we’ve never met him. But anyway, welcome home mister!
This episode actually opened with Ralph pissing in a bucket. Fitting, because Eugene, brother to a diddled Madeleine, wants him to pull his pants up. Do the right thing, he demands of Ralph, who has been noisily having it off in every room of Eugene’s house.
“He’s using you!” Eugene shouts at Madeleine later, to which she challenges: “Maybe I don’t fucking care! Maybe I like it!” It’s a glorious blow for emancipated female sexuality. I only wish it wasn’t being struck on behalf of Ralph, who’s the sort of man who would only stumble across “the right thing” if it was laid directly in the path of “the selfish thing”.
In the less genital-y main plot, the whitewashing of the Chandru Mohan affair is nearly complete. Save for that pesky piece of falsified evidence, a certificate linking the assassin to Gandhi’s Congress party, which has been lost. “Or taken”, as Ralph correctly surmises. I guess they could just knock up another forgery – that’s the great thing about forgeries – but having two knocking about might give the game away. So a list is drawn up of everyone who had access to the room on the day, in classic whodunit fashion, except we already know it was Aafrin.
Oh yes, the Viceroy tuns up, a large moustache in a safari hat. A doddery old colonel-type, if nice enough; he and Ralph spend most of the episode play-fighting with umbrellas, boning quail, having sing-alongs and generally doing sweet fanny adams in terms of governance. God knows where he’s been. Meeting the prime minister he says, though he could just as easily have been wandering around the British Museum, lost.
Anyway, as part of the silly buggers, Aafrin is invited to “present himself at the viceregal lodge for some sport”. Which sounds like they might want him to dance naked with a peacock whilst reciting Masonic oaths, but turns out to actually be golf. Ralph and the Viceroy, dressed like they’re filming an Outkast video, teach Aafrin the secret of a good swing. I’d like to see a montage of Ralph teaching Aafrin to iceskate, or put up shelves, or go on the hayride together. Bro club! Machiavellian Bro club.
Sarah’s world is degenerating further into a stew of suffering, both received and meted out. She reveals to a visibly horrified Alice that she knows her secret. Alice is – like those terrifying spiders scuttling around the UK a few months ago – a false widow. Her husband is alive, and healthy. She has abandoned him, and now Sarah knows. Alice asks her what she wants. “To help, silly,” chirps Sarah. I had no idea these words could be so chilling. Later we see her have dutiful sex with her husband Dougie, shrouded in cold blue light. It’s stilted, passionless, jerky, like watching pornography through a dial up internet connection. Brrr.
Armitage the drunken plantation owner – now there’s a Happy Families character – is leaving. He has lost his land to Ramu Sood. Sood generously offers to let Armitage’s nephew Ian stay on as manager, which Ian is pleased by. Cynthia’s having none of it. For Ian to be subordinate to a subcontinental is, for her, like making a puffin chancellor of the exchequer. “That’s not the way things are here,” she says, narrowing her eyes with fury. You have to remember she’s a product of her time: ie, racist.
On the romance front, Aafrin finds Alice’s scarf at his graveyard hookup spot with Sita, and understands she has been spying on him. So that’s why every scene they have begins with six seconds of staring at each other, he realises, inhaling deeply from the scarf. She’s my real love interest! Ralph, meanwhile, doesn’t know what to do about Madeleine. Is he into her? He blows hot and cold, like a fancy hairdryer. “What should I do?” he asks Aafrin, for no other reason than that Aafrin did a nice painting of her, because Ralph made him. Obviously Aafrin doesn’t know what he should do. If this was Tinder, it would be the slowest swipe right in history.
After a langorous build up, the episode’s final act kicked into gear. At a dinner stressful enough to qualify for Come Dine With Me (at the Viceregal Lodge) Aafrin discovers the evening is not as innocent as it appeared. Every guest at the party is on the list of suspects. While they tuck into guinea fowl, their homes are being ransacked in search of the stolen evidence. Aafrin enrusts Alice to find Sita to take a message instructing Sunni to destroy the paper. Got that? It doesn’t matter, because Sita chickens out, which is understandable as the family hate her.
The certificate is found by the police, in Aafrin’s home. We don’t yet know the fallout. Ralph doesn’t let on that he knows, and draws his new best buddy in even tighter. All leverage is good leverage, right Ralph? He must have an empire state-sized secret corroding that calculating brain of his. Time for it to come out, please.
The episode has a terrifying coda: Adam has a dream about his mother, who emerges wild-haired from the woods to reclaim him, looking like she’s just crawled out of a Japanese horror film. The dream is rendered in the same blue light used for Sarah and Dougie’s sex scene. It’s that scary.
Collar-a epidemic
Ralph’s collars are now approaching Harry Hill-sized wingtips. He favours a narrow tie-knot, perhaps to emphasize their vast acreage. He spends much of this episode standing next to the Viceroy, who wears a tiny Gladstone collar over an enormous cravat. Such differing ratios of neck-restriction, poles apart, yet encompassed within a single two shot. Classic TV for collar aficionados.
Fife is nice. But come on!
“Forty years in this goddamn stinking pit,” complains Armitage of his plantation in the lush Himalayan green belt. ‘You must get me home to Fife!’ (Sadly, he dies in the train on the way there, which Cynthia casually drops into conversation with his nephew, Ian. It’s, like, the third or fourth thing they talk about.)
The cut that runs deep
“How old are you now, Ralph?” asks the Viceroy. “Thirty, sir. You came to my birthday tea, if you remember,’ replies a put-out Ralph. Does he mean 30, or nine? Jeez man, don’t get hung up about your birthday tea. Can’t expect people to remember that stuff.
She’s like a rainbow
Seriously, the colours in this program. I had to adjust the contrast settings at one point, because it felt like I was watching one of the new Hobbit films, or Alice in Wonderland.
