Spoiler alert: this recap is for people watching Top of the Lake weekly on the BBC. Please do not add spoilers from later episodes.
After Robin’s fiery battle with Al Parker in episode three, I thought this series couldn’t get any sillier, but I have to admit that I enjoyed this week’s much more than the rest of it. It felt as if it shed the restraints of trying to be a linear, conventional drama and settled in to its own pace and weirdness. It reminded me of what I’d admired in season one. Robin’s dream, with a foetus in each hand; Brett’s careful lowering of the flower on to the body; the queasily surreal build-up to the shooting; and even Miranda tossing her baby belly into the sea – it was all very strange and full of dread.
We know much more about everything after this penultimate episode. Cinnamon is Padma, and the tragedy of her being identified not by a friend or family member, but by a client, to Robin’s disgust, is not lost. We also know that Miranda and Adrian’s relationship is real, and that it’s the pregnant belly that was a lie, hence the smoking and drinking. Miranda is, in fact, using a surrogate – likely to be a sex worker, rather than a student – via the dodgy clinic. Robin and Miranda’s friendship was wrecked by Miranda’s behaviour at the clinic, then quickly restored. My feeling was that they got along fine, with the odd moment of irritation, but this week it looks as if they were supposed to hate each other, with Miranda being Robin’s “whipping boy”. A chat and a hug by the water sorted it out, though, and they were back fighting crime (but only if that crime directly affected them).
Poor Pixie, the surrogacy fixer, whose character added a note of Twin Peaks strangeness, with her baby voice and childlike demeanour, and even in her suicide, with a dummy in her mouth. She claimed that all she did was pass on the number, and that people thanked her. The crowd of desperate people assembled at her house to hear the truth would disagree.
Never has luggage sounded so ominous as when Puss called for a big suitcase. He and the man who looks like Little Britain’s Lou and Andy in one body took the pregnant girl into a garage and Puss joked (I think) that they were cutting her throat. It wasn’t clear to me what was happening, though I do hope she got away. Puss’s grand plan now is to exonerate himself by giving Robin just enough information to stitch up the others, telling her he saw a green suitcase, and that she should investigate the shop.
But perhaps it’s all over for Puss, anyway. Brett’s descent into visions and violence was eerie, particularly when he introduced a naked and non-existent Cinnamon to his mother on the stairs. While Pyke and Robin were playing mum and dad, Brett went to the shop to take his revenge. Puss pushed Mary in front of him as Brett fired at Lou-Andy: if this isn’t the end for Mary, then surely Puss is, at last, a goner? We’ll find out in the finale next week.
Notes and observations
• Very important: did Nicole Kidman film her scenes at a different time? In the kitchen, every shot is over-the-shoulder, and it looks an awful lot like she and Elisabeth Moss weren’t both there for it.
• I’m so confused about Puss’s film, and particularly the babies. What is this film? Are we to take from it that they’ve been keeping all the surrogacy babies in a secret chamber in the brothel? Why? What’s going on?
• I’m also confused by how Puss found a suit jacket that also looked as if it had been made by Adidas.
• Does this now mean that every police officer we’ve met is not only breaking the law, but breaking the law in relation to this case?
• Padma means “lotus flower” – was that a lotus flower Brett left on her body?
• If it hadn’t hammered home quite enough just how much this is about mothers, the one woman who so far had not been concerned with childbearing herself, Mary, had a negative pregnancy test in her room.
• Miranda and Adrian have been carrying on for long enough to go through the process of finding an illegal surrogate, despite him not yet getting around to leaving his wife.
• Robin did have three miscarriages in New Zealand, as she alluded to in episode one. What are the odds that Pyke will get her pregnant again?
Misogyny watch
Tough call this week: the cops really laid it on thick, both over the body – “Guess she died fucking. She shave her muff?” and in Stali’s continuing obsession with Robin. He gets fixated easily, and women don’t always mean no when they say no, apparently. Also, a brief return for the Cafe Bros, whose charming patter may well end up on the evening news.
Quote of the week
It was close, with Robin’s drunken “I’m a detective but also a super-detective, okay?”, but I went for Chief Cafe Bro inventing his own legend: “Are you making a documentary about me? The Fuck Wizard strikes back.”
