Happy Valley is wasting no time getting down to the good stuff. Sally Wainwright’s multi Bafta-winning crime drama has only been back on screens for a total of three hours and already it’s delivered more glorious tension and high drama than most shows do in a season. Sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) may be ready to hand over her badge in retirement, but the seedy criminals of West Yorkshire aren’t ready to let her go just yet. Here’s your recap of everything that went down in episode three…
“Hiya!”
A lesser show would make us wait for answers, but this is Happy Valley and satisfaction is guaranteed. This episode picks up from where the last left off: in a cafe in Sheffield where Catherine has just confronted Clare (Siobhan Finneran) about secretly taking Ryan (Rhys Connah) to see his good-for-nothing father Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) in prison.
It’s a sister showdown for the ages, as Clare looks cowardly down at her sandwich under Catherine’s piercing gaze. Time for some answers. “Where do you want to start, at the beginning?” asks Clare, prompting a quick rehashing of all of Tommy’s crimes from a sarcastic Catherine, including but not exclusive to kidnapping Ann Gallagher (Charlie Murphy), driving over Kirsten (Sophie Rundle) three times in a Mini Cooper, and oh yeah, beating up Ryan’s granny so badly she nearly died in hospital. “Why don’t we skip all that and cut to the chase?” smirks Catherine.
It turns out then, that Ryan had been writing to Tommy when he was in prison in Gravesend without ever hearing back. Around 18 months ago, when Tommy was moved to a closer prison in Sheffield – something which, by the way, Clare believes to be a fluke – he managed to get one of his prison mates to pass along a message to Ryan outside his school gates. It wasn’t Clare who Ryan first approached about visiting Tommy, but Neil (Con O’Neil) who was persuaded by the teenager’s anger and upset – and who, notably, stands by his decision to allow Tommy to see his dad.
Clare has a go at explaining why she went along with it, telling Catherine that the pair “genuinely” seem to want to get to know one another, and that she thinks Tommy doesn’t have an alternative agenda when it comes to Ryan. Catherine predictably is having none of it, arguing that Tommy is “too far beyond the pale” to ever apologise or understand his various wrongs. She also divulges that Tommy was brought up by a heroin addict. Perhaps most shocking, however, is Catherine’s stance on forgiveness. “When he asks me to forgive him, I will,” she says. “It won’t happen because he’s a narcissist and a psychopath.”
The bottom line is this: if Ryan wants to continue seeing Tommy in prison, he can’t live with Catherine anymore. Ryan, therefore, is bunking with his auntie and Neil for the time being. He also deduces that his mum Becky died by suicide, but it remains to be seen whether he really knows why. As Clare puts it later in the episode: “What a f***ing mess.”
Happy families
We do get a peek at what Ryan’s visits to Tommy in prison entail – and it’s not as sinister as you might imagine. No plotting of the sort. It’s mostly just chit chat, over cups of tea and biscuits fetched by Neil. The situation is still tense regarding Catherine, however. When Neil brings up her name, he is shot down by Tommy with a look that could kill. “Who?” he barks in response. Notably, Tommy asks Ryan to come and see him in Leeds on Tuesday, when he will be appearing in court. Do we sense a prison break on the cards?
For a brief moment, it’s happy families, with Tommy beaming when Ryan calls him “dad”. The peace doesn’t last long, though. When Neil and Ryan return to the car, all Clare has to say is “she knows” and the blood drains out of their faces. Anyone else get shivers?
Help in unlikely places
Stuck between a rock and a hard place, or rather his granny and dad, Ryan is running low on people he can lean on. It’s the only reason I can think of to explain why Ryan would be scraping the barrel asking for advice from his horrible games coach, and Joanna’s abusive husband, Rob Hepworth (Mark Stanley) who sits Ryan down for a heart-to-heart. Rob apologises for being hard on the kid and even divulges to the him that his marriage isn’t a happy one – which is putting it lightly.
Has Rob indeed turned over a new leaf and overnight become a decent man? The ominous music and sinister look on his face suggests otherwise. After all, Joanna (Mollie Winnards) did reveal his strange fixation on boys at his school in episode two.
Game on. Or off? Or on? Or off?
Last episode, we saw Faisal (Amit Shah) gawk in horror at Joanna’s suggestion that they kill Rob. Now, however, the local pharmacist has warmed to the idea and has already hatched a plan. This Friday, he tells Joanna, “you’ll crush up three or four Diazepam” in Rob’s drink and wait for him to fall asleep. Once Rob is unconscious, Faisal will enter the house and inject air into his veins, killing him in under 15 seconds. After that, he’ll drive Rob out in his car to Huddersfield and leave him there – the suggestion being that he drove there in search of prostitutes, while Joanna was asleep at home.
Bloody-nosed Catherine in ‘Happy Valley’
The problem is that while Faisal is now enthusiastic about the potential murder, Joanna is having second thoughts. Should they kill him? Should they not? In her confusion, she lets slip that she had lied earlier about Rob knowing that Faisal was the one who supplied her with pills, which was the main reason Faisal had plotted the murder in the first place. Her lying, together with her indecisiveness – and an emasculating comment she makes about Faisal’s less-than-muscular figure – leads to disaster. Faisal, who has barely been holding it together as it is, cracks. He picks up a nearby rolling pin and beats Joanna to death. The only problem is, she’s not dead and he decides he has to finish the job off with a needle. Just as he’s about to finish up, Catherine calls Joanna and leaves a voicemail asking her to come into the station. Great timing. I’m sure Faisal is feeling really relaxed about the whole murder thing now.
On a side note, we also learn that given their limited funds, Faisal’s parents had to choose which son they would send to medical school. They chose to send his brother, leaving Faisal to pay his own way through education, so he could only afford four years to study pharmacology. “That’s why he has such a big chip on his shoulder,” explains his daughter to her sister.
Danielle
Last week, we learnt that a woman was found dead after falling out of the window of her fourth floor flat. In tonight’s episode, we discover the victim is Danielle, a blind woman who lived in Elland with no family who was tricked into believing one of the gangsters working for the Knezevices was her boyfriend.
What’s Rob up to now?
