Most cop dramas go out of their way to make the case personal, but few have done it as emphatically as Rellik. For as long as we’ve known DCI Gabriel Markham, he has been a marked man, the left side of his face irrevocably scarred by an acid attack he is convinced was the handiwork of the serial killer he and his team are investigating. Under convincingly red and raw prosthetics that have evolved week to week, we’ve watched Richard Dormer glare, simmer and explode at colleagues and suspects alike. Apart from some fleeting moments of vulnerability – confessing to his police psychiatrist that his injuries make it hard to swallow, or gingerly dabbing antiseptic cream on to his ruined neck – the horrifying event seems to have hardened Gabriel’s soul into something ugly and vengeful.
From the outset, we’ve known this day – or night – was coming. Following three briskly back-pedalling episodes that have skipped days and weeks in Rellik’s ambitious reversed timeline, this was the big one: the night of. After witnessing the extraordinary trauma of the attack, we would also finally get to meet the old Gabriel, the guy who seemed to instill such fierce loyalty in his co-workers. Rellik creators Jack and Harry Williams have been cheerfully messing around with narrative conventions, contorting their grim, gothic story so it unfolds backwards in big, often bloody chunks. So, it seems only fair to do the same. For a change, let’s assess what happened forwards before digging into what tonight’s episode teased us with backwards.
Press play
Another big time jump, roughly five weeks before last week’s Barker family bust-up. Carefree and cocksure Gabriel is canoodling with his lovely wife, Lisa, over breakfast, teasing his boss – “Morning fuckface,” is how he greets Ray Stevenson’s burly Benton – and breezily demanding 800 hours overtime to stake out east London’s playparks overnight to catch the serial killer. Instead, a desecrated body is dumped next to the police station. An incandescent Gabriel insults the killer at a press conference: “You’re weak and you’re pathetic, you’re a limp-dicked bag of shit.” That night, still brooding, Gabriel calls Shepard to resume their affair. After planning their assignation in a grotty tower-block safehouse, he discovers Benton is already there with local sex worker Kerry. Furious, Gabriel storms off only to be ambushed outside, an attack witnessed by Kerry. While Gabriel is rushed to hospital, Benton hurriedly clears up his pizza and cocaine mess at the safehouse. While semi-conscious, Gabriel overhears Lisa tearfully confess that their daughter Hannah isn’t his and even in his weakened state he takes steps to confirm it via a DNA test. After unsuccessfully trying to blackmail Benton, Kerry – who claimed she could identify the acid killer – turns up dead.
Rewind
Dread has been baked into Rellik from the start, and the opening minutes of tonight’s instalment were pregnant with foreboding. Gabriel, his face covered by a frankly pretty terrifying medical mask, staggering out of hospital, a man diminished by an enemy who remains frustratingly anonymous. The foreknowledge that the fateful acid attack must be imminent added tension to scenes that were already volatile, as Gabriel lashed out at friends and, notably, his family.
If previous episodes have made it hard to get into Gabriel’s head, this was the most internalised instalment yet, with lots of immersive, unsettling POV shots from his hospital bed. Dormer has been doing excellent work under prosthetics for the past few weeks but tonight he had to hit highly emotional beats while bundled under swathes of bandages. In the end, Dormer gave another heroically wrung-out and raspy performance from under his Invisible Man outfit. It made his reverse transformation in the second half of the episode even more startling. Recently, Dormer’s face has often been obscured on screen, from the eyepatch and swaddling furs of Beric Dondarrion to the scraggly beard he was sporting in Fortitude. So when we finally saw Gabriel pre-attack – clean-shaven, twinkly-eyed, struggling with a tie – it was striking how fresh-faced he looked.
The reverse storytelling gimmick meant that we knew exactly where he would be assaulted before we saw it take place, and the camera seemed to take wicked pleasure in tracking Gabriel as he set out across the scraggly waste ground. If that first trip en route to discovering Benton’s squalid party in their secret safehouse was an effective fake out, the tension on the fateful walk back was almost unbearable.
The montages of rewinding time that have become Rellik’s signature effect featured the brief, unsettling sight of acid splashing on skin. When the attack finally came, it was actually the sound design that did most of the heavy lifting. If Rellik’s intrusive soundtrack has sometimes seemed rather overbearing, it nailed this most crucial scene: the hiss of acid mixed with Gabriel’s panicked screams was truly nightmarish.
We got another vague glimpse of the killer, dressed head to toe in black. Poor Kerry claimed to Benton that she had seen the face of the attacker, but was careful to refer to them as “person” rather than he or she, fuel for any pet theories that Shepard might have attacked Gabriel in a misbegotten attempt to drive him away from his wife and back to her (she did seem to arrive on the scene very quickly).
With Gabriel physically reeling from the attack, and clearly emotionally crushed to discover that Hannah – the daughter he dotes on, and who clearly dotes on him judging by her clarinet playing by his hospital bed and the stack of boxsets she has sourced for him to watch during his recuperation – is not his, Rellik is clearly moving toward its endgame. The Williams brothers have at least one more trick up their sleeve, since the sixth episode will apparently pick up where we left off in episode one. But that means an entire instalment shadowing Gabriel in his prime. Perhaps we’ll definitively find out if he is really, truly, a good cop.
Notes and observations
• Shepard’s tense prison visit with her dying father Henry (a creepy cameo by Clive Russell) dangled the tidbit that he was a former chemistry teacher. Might Elaine have picked up some useful acid knowledge from her bad dad (who, it was implied, had murdered her mother by stabbing her 18 times)?
• Pre-attack Gabriel certainly had a swagger to him, his nonconformist status underlined by the fact that after being introduced fussing with a necktie he ultimately rejected wearing it. What a maverick! He also seemed to be putting some moves on fluttery young cop Jenny before their twilight stakeout was interrupted by bat-wielding vigilantes.
• “It’s Tutankhamun, risen from the grave!” Benton, addressing a heavily bandaged Gabriel, probably needs to work on his bedside manner.
• We finally got to see the proper context for Christine confessing to be the acid killer at her therapy session: she was winding up psychiatrist Isaac, who appeared to be getting very turned on by all the murder talk. Isaac also tried to gatecrash the investigation, claiming to Shepard he had already been working with Gabriel to help profile the acid killer. Wouldn’t this have come up when the two interact later?
• Is it too late to swap out Rellik’s dissonant trip-hop theme for some of Hannah’s lovely clarinet playing?
What did you think of Richard Dormer’s anguished performance? Were you surprised that Benton turned out be such a creep? Do you think Shepard is a plausible suspect? Let us know in the comments below.
