“Oh, it gets dark. Oh, it gets lonely, on the other side from you,” sang Kate Bush in Wuthering Heights. It could be the soundtrack to tonight’s episode as River delves further into the murky world of Stevie’s secret life.
Abi Morgan has spent two hours making me fall for Stevie and her mischievous, irrepressible banter with her boss, and now she’s starting to look less and less like the person we thought we knew. Large cash withdrawals, a second mobile phone and a frankly alarming kebab habit.
The numbers on Stevie’s phone link to that kebab shop, a sex chat line (her manifest shrugs and says she gets lonely), an unregistered mobile number and Jimmy Stephenson, her ex-con brother. She said she hadn’t spoken to him since he went to prison 16 years earlier.
Meanwhile, Stevie’s mum tells River that Frankie (the younger brother) hasn’t been home for two days. While all the focus is on Jimmy, the obvious villain, who boasts of decapitating a man, I want to know what the deal is with junior. And then, sure enough, he has a confession to make tonight too. But not about Stevie’s death, just about where he was at the time in question.
It turns out, after much chasing down, that the two boys weren’t watching X Factor the night of her death, which gets them an instant pardon in my court. Jimmy had dragged Frankie to see a prostitute in the hope of helping him pop his cherry. Do we believe any of this? I think it’s fairly obvious that Frankie has far too open a nature to be a good liar. But he remains heavily under the influence of his hard-bitten brother.
A big motif tonight is the continued buzzing of the strip lights in municipal building and how they grate on River’s nerves. This gels nicely with the random report last week that stated people who can’t stand the noisy chewing of others are probably geniuses.
The subplot this week features the apparently accidental electrocution of married construction worker, Jordie Merton. It turns out to be a crime of passion, or at least a cover-up of passion, as his Ukrainian colleague finally admits they were having an affair and they had rowed over Jordie wanting to end it.
My favourite moment tonight happens when River urges Jordie’s soon-to-be-widow to go to his bedside, before it’s too late, and say anything she needs to say to him. So she does. And as we stay in the hospital corridor, the stillness of the strip-lit corridor is suddenly disturbed by her repeated, angry shouts of, “Bastard. Bastard.” Quite right too, missus.
River’s continued eccentricity is another big focus of this episode. Sympathetic Ira provides a big laugh when he does his impression of River, saying he leaks too much of the madness in front of the punters. Ira is building his part up nicely to fill the space left by our newfound doubts over Stevie.
River’s relationship with his psychologist, Rosa, is explored and expanded tonight as he follows her to the Globe Theatre on the South Bank, unsure himself why he has done it. Although she is colluding with the enemy in her relationship with Marcus McDonald, she obviously has a soft spot for River, passing him in his psych test and asking him to start attending regular sessions with her. We must presume it’s because she finds him clinically fascinating and not that she wants to start a second workplace relationship.
The Lambeth Poisoner provides handy exposition tonight when he reveals that Stevie gave River £10,000 outside that Chinese restaurant on the night she died. Before we have too much of a chance to start doubting the integrity of both of them, it’s further revealed that she asked River to use the money to take care of Frankie if anything happened to her. She knew she was going to die.
Skarsgård makes me cry again, gazing at baby Hank (Ira’s son) as his eyes fill with something close to adoration. I am powerless to resist the Skarsgård emotion trigger.
Tonight’s final Stevie revelation comes when Ira scans the CCTV footage from the cameras outside Crystal Kebabs. They clearly show Stevie affectionately holding the face of a mystery man. No actual snogging but they look intimate.
“You didn’t think you were the only one, did you?” snaps Stevie at River in the street shortly afterwards, all that warmth and fondness suddenly absent. Obviously this reflects how he feels about her, not the truth of her, but it’s still like a cold slap on a grey day. No 1970s karaoke tonight, just the mournful hum of Nina Simone’s To Love Somebody. It’s like a light going out when Stevie’s smile disappears.
Stream of consciousness
- “You’re mad,” says a rattled Jimmy to River as he tries to remain bluff under interrogation. “No comment,” hisses River, their noses almost touching. I love that his eccentricity scares people.
- River observes that there are hardly any trees anymore, no oxygen, no air. This takes me back to that beautiful image of River sat high in the branches of a tree in episode one. He is elemental.
- Particularly delighted to see Jim Norton turn up tonight as Uncle Mickey. He made his mark as Bishop Brennan (Call me Bishop, ye little bollix) in Father Ted.
- The Lambeth Poisoner’s final rant to River tonight is disturbing. “I am you,” he roars. And “I am death” shortly afterwards. He’s the part of River’s psyche that wants him to go fully Falling Down but can he fight him?
