With red herrings, dead herrings, an opportunistic copycat and the mental gymnastics of trying to keep the plot straight after five weeks of convoluted backwards narrative, Rellik has delighted in leading us on its danse macabre, like a particularly murderous conga in reverse. Tonight’s penultimate episode finally staged what is surely the biggest reveal, confirming the identity of the ninja-garbed assassin who had apparently made it their mission to ruin Gabriel’s life.
Congratulations to those of you who predicted that the killer was DI Elaine Shepard, shown coolly slitting the throat of drunk psychiatrist Jonas Borner, her face fitfully illuminated in the darkness by some slightly improbable welding sparks. A recent transfer to Gabriel’s squad, Shepard had three burning passions: collecting vinyl records, melting the identifying marks off her victims with hydrochloric acid and Gabriel himself. She also wasn’t working alone, sort of. Those heart-to-hearts with her unnamed flatmate? That was actually a hallucination of her murdered mother, which would explain why they were usually talking about Shepard’s banged-up dad Henry. So does it all add up? Let’s look at how the episode would play out forward.
Press play
It is a month before Gabriel’s acid attack. Shepard is reliving a childhood trauma, discussing it with a mental manifestation of her dead mother. Then she stalks and kills Jonas Borner, a psychiatrist colleague of Isaac Taylor, and poses his acid-scarred body at a playpark. The next morning, after having sex in a police station toilet with her hungover colleague Gabriel, Shepard finds herself assigned to the case. Isaac calls in the police after receiving a panicked voicemail from Jonas. He and Gabriel pull an all-nighter to review his patient files for persons of interest, including future suspects Christine Levison and Steven Mills. Shepard visits her father in prison and hears that he has advanced lung cancer. After discovering Isaac has a restraining order against another patient, Gabriel chases and arrests the clearly disturbed Richard Bell. Confident that they have nabbed their murderer, Gabriel ducks out of a family dinner for another assignation with Shepard, who presses him on the seriousness of their affair. They receive a call confirming that a second body has been found and since Bell was in custody at the time of the attack, they have to release him. The investigation is back to square one, and Gabriel has no idea he is sleeping with the killer.
Rewind
In retrospect, the signs were all there. Jodi Balfour being Rellik’s second-billed star combined with the fact that Shepard seemed reserved to the point of sullenness at work hinted that something else was going on under the surface. While we’ve watched Gabriel evolve – physically healing but emotionally regressing into a nasty piece of work – Balfour’s performance has remained unnervingly static. Shepard has always been a wary, watchful presence and finding out she was the similarly methodical killer felt like a satisfying reveal – shocking while still somewhat inevitable.
That said, her killing spree does start rather arbitrarily. It seemed safe to assume that her renewed visits with her imprisoned father after such a long period of estrangement might have triggered her childhood trauma. But by the time she hears that Henry is definitely on his way out, she has already killed poor Jonas. Why him? It seems unlikely that Shepard would choose her first victim at random. And this wasn’t an impulse kill – she was waiting for the burned-out boozehound in the back seat of his car, with the belt-and-braces approach of both a suffocating plastic bag and a short, sharp knife. Is there a pattern to the killings we are still not seeing? Isaac and Jonas were involved in something shady at a psychiatric unit 20 years ago, and Gabriel also seems aware of the scandal. Might it yet have some bearing on Rellik’s overarching story?
There have been various trips up blind alleys but the show’s recurring mission statement, repeatedly espoused by Gabriel, is that if you travel far enough into someone’s past you can explain how they became who they are. It doesn’t feel as if we’ve unlocked that touchstone with Shepard yet, and because the final episode will jump forward in time to where we were left dangling at the end of episode one, it’s unclear whether we will ever get a fuller explanation.
What has also emerged of late is that Gabriel, Rellik’s nominal hero, used to be a monumentally unlikeable guy. In his professional life, he was a self-serving cop willing to bend or break any rule to get his collar. In his personal life, he was a cocky coke fiend and notorious womaniser. Tonight, it was implied that he had leeringly propositioned a tattooed barmaid, beaten up her publican husband then had sex with her upstairs. En route to interrogate Isaac, Gabriel was asked by his plodding subordinate Martin about his apparent addiction to infidelity: “I don’t choose to screw around, it just happens … We’re all just animals, right?”
By snapping back to the events of episode one, the upcoming finale risks incurring a serious case of narrative whiplash. But it will also bring into sharp relief the differences between pre-attack Gabriel and his more empathetic scarred self. Will we be able to spot any similar change in Shepard, the preternaturally calm puppet-master behind it all? Probably not, but I’m ready to be proved wrong.
Notes and observations
• This week’s weird cop shop side-plot: poor Martin in a bedraggled chicken costume.
• “All you need is a crystal ball and a wart on your chin.” Gabriel does not seem particularly impressed by Isaac’s predictive powers.
• So many sex scenes this week, presumably to emphasise the early intensity of Gabriel and Shepard’s affair. One dreamlike sequence had their naked bodies entwined in (very painful-looking) Christmas tree lights. Seems to come earlier every year.
Did you guess Shepard was the killer? How did you feel about ghost mum? Where can Rellik go from here? Let us know in the comments below.
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