One side effect of telling a serial killer story backwards is that it can seem like things are getting better, at least in terms of crime statistics. In Rellik’s some-assembly-required opener, disfigured detective Gabriel (Richard Dormer) and his partner Shepard (Jodi Balfour) had seven bodies piled up. Episode two kicks off a whole 16 days earlier, so now – or, more accurately, then – there are only five horrific murders outstanding.
That 16 days might seem rather a large leap, but it does land on another notably tumultuous 24-hour period for poor Gabriel as he crashes around chasing rickety leads while his personal life implodes. Shepard tries a different approach, pulling a sickie to smoke joints, listen to the Style Council and deal with some cryptic family business. Who wore it best? Let’s piece it together.
Rewind
Nightfall on an anonymous London highway, and Christine (Rosalind Eleazar) – the scarred suspect who last time seemed to enjoy telling Gabriel she had been diagnosed as a narcissist with “unfulfilled psychopathic ideation” – staggers along in thin clothes and bare feet. The juxtaposition of soothing tiki music with visuals that could come from a post-apocalyptic zombie movie seems like a brisk way to reacclimatise viewers to Rellik’s warped, funhouse-mirror worldview.
After a frustrating time at work, Gabriel is surveilling his own house, where wife Lisa (Lark Winther) waits up. Rather than going home, he decides to call on Shepard, who is wearing a spectacular red dress that seems rather unsuited for slobbing round the house. After a brief heart-to-heart, the lovers tentatively reconnect.
That’s when we reset to three hours and 45 minutes earlier. Gabriel barges into Christine’s housing estate flat and aggressively bundles her into his car. Is this really an arrest? As they drive around, Christine seems uniquely capable of pushing Gabriel’s buttons, taunting “waffle face” about his injuries until he purposefully veers into oncoming traffic for a frighteningly long time.
Gabriel wants to know what was on psychiatrist Isaac Taylor’s laptop and, seemingly chastened, Christine opens up about her abusive father, how her mother decisively dealt with him and how Taylor had recorded all these revelations in their therapy sessions. It is a raw and upsetting performance from Eleazar – the sort of intense, extended scene you might expect near the climax of an episode rather than served up early, another side effect of Rellik’s unmoored timeline. If Gabriel is touched by Christine’s story, he hides it well, kicking her out to walk home in the twilight.
Rewind almost eight hours earlier and Shepard, in that striking red outfit, is the only person at a cremation. Then she sells a gorgeous classic E-Type Jaguar to a baffled geezer for five grand. Elsewhere, Gabriel and the rest of the team pay a rather more official visit to Christine, recovering what seems to be Taylor’s laptop. Back at the station, Gabriel questions her about the theft but is constantly deflected by Christine, who implies he is persecuting her because of their shared scarring. With the interrogation a bust, Gabriel is summoned by Lisa for a discreet meeting where she shows him her morning post: blurry, black-and-white snaps of Gabriel and Shepard having sex in a park. “You can see your scorpion tattoo,” notes Lisa dryly. Is it blackmail? Intimidation? A prank?
If you have a scorpion tattoo perhaps you’re always braced for a sting in the tail but when Gabriel returns to the station, there are fire engines outside. The camera tails him as he stomps up stairs and back to his desk through smoke and coughing co-workers to find that the evidence room – and Taylor’s laptop – has been barbecued. As the camera zooms in on keyboard letters shrivelling up under the intense heat we rewind to …
… six-and-a-half hours earlier. Gabriel is talking to a therapist: under duress, it seems, although he does talk about how since he was attacked with acid he feels uncomfortable in his own skin. It is the most vulnerable we have seen the growly sleuth to date, and Dormer sells it to the hilt despite the prosthetics.
Then we cut to Shepard, who has apparently called in sick but is just lounging on her bed smoking a joint with a friend. Her father, with whom she had a difficult relationship, has died and she seems to be looking forward to selling his beloved Jag for buttons. She also toys with her friend’s lighter just a little too long. Could she be a secret firebug?
Spool back 11 hours and it’s the middle of the night, around 1.30am. Gabriel, in bed with Lisa, wakes up from a muddled nightmare and slips off to see Shepard. We learn their relationship has been on hold since he was attacked. “We can’t start this again, not after Hannah,” says Gabriel, ominously mentioning his teenage daughter, who we haven’t seen all episode.
After Gabriel scurries away, Shepard calmly flips through those fateful al fresco sex pics and slides them into an envelope pre-addressed to Lisa. She obviously wants to destabilise Gabriel’s marriage, but is there a motive beyond reigniting their relationship? Meanwhile, Christine brazenly breaks into Taylor’s office and lifts his laptop while the alarm blares. Reviewing their sessions, she stops on one of her juicier segments: “I killed them, I burned them, their families will have to live with that uncertainty for the rest of the lives.” It seems like an explosive confession, although a final closeup on Christine’s unreadable face suggests there must be more to it than that.
Press play
So how does that all look forwards? Gabriel visits Shepard in the dead of night to end their affair, while Christine breaks into Taylor’s office to steal a laptop. The next day, Shepard pulls a sickie to bury her dad while Gabriel, on a CCTV tip-off, latches on to Christine as a suspect in the laptop theft and perhaps more. The cops recover the laptop, but then someone torches the evidence room. Gabriel, reeling from an intense therapy session and enraged by what seem like blackmail photos sent to his wife, essentially abducts Christine to try and force her to confess. She successfully misdirects him and, angry and drained, he seeks out Shepard for solace.
Notes and observations
• This week’s cop shop B-plot was an office romance between detective Jenny and receptionist Alex that – played forwards – began with him preparing to break it off and her revealing she was pregnant and somehow ended up with them being engaged. Are these asides welcome palate cleansers, or just a distraction?
• So far Rellik has seemed relatively blooper-free, although a sharp-eyed commentator did point out that after seeing the cops enthusiastically bash in the door of last week’s head red herring Steven Mills his poor wife still seemed to have to unlock it when she returned later that night. Any glaring continuity clangers in episode two?
• Christine doesn’t want to go back to the police station because “it smells of budget cuts”. Eleazar’s taunting performance is one of the most delicious in the show.
• Who even gets a scorpion tattoo?
Has Rellik found a groove to go with its gimmick? Is Christine too obvious a suspect to be the killer? What happened to the city boy with the Kingsman glasses? Let us know your thoughts and theories in the comments below.
