Episode Five (Finale)
For the first time we see Hattie after she was abducted, running through the forest as if being pursued. Then it seems her hunter catches up with her. Gail leaves more messages for Linus, still ignorant as to who he is. Seth is released from prison as witnesses can place him well away from Hattie on the day, and so he has an alibi, whether he wants it or not: the confession was all in his mind. Linus has returned home to confront his father, at knifepoint no less. He accuses him of killing his wife, and Hattie. But Everett alleges that it was Linus who killed his own mother. In a bid to disarm his son, Everett lunges but cuts himself on the knife.
Fiona goes back into the attic, and this time finds the scrap of hair that her husband had said was a bird’s nest. It’s clearly not, and she at first throws it in the bin, then puts it into an evidence bag. Everett tells Linus that his mother died when she tripped over one of his toys he had left on the landing and fell down the stairs after an argument. He has been protecting Linus from the truth, shielding him from the guilt. Freed from jail, Seth goes back to Steve but his brother does not want anything to do with him. He has lost his son forever, and blames it on Seth.
There’s a memorial service held for Hattie. Gail attends, her head held defiantly high now that her husband has been exonerated. While in the church she takes the opportunity to ring Linus again and watches to see whose phone rings. She zeroes in on the young lad, who looks surprised. Seth bursts into the church, to try to tell everyone that Hattie is not dead, she will come back, changed. Outside the church Gail catches Linus, begs him to talk to her. Hattie’s father asks Steve to allow him talk to Seth, and in return he’ll square things with Steve’s ex-wife. After what Seth said in the church, the father needs to know what he meant. At least, that’s what he says. But when he does talk to him in the forest, he kills him, thinking him responsible for his daughter’s murder.
After betraying his brother into the hands of what he must have known was the man who would take his life, Steve goes back to the house but Angie is not interested in letting him see Harry again, despite what was promised. Fiona goes to see Everett, ostensibly to apologise for spying on him earlier. Gail asks Linus if he is a rent boy, which he denies. He tells her that he used to go into the woods with a girl and put on a show for Malcolm, and this was what her husband paid him for. She goes to give him the money she found in her husband’s briefcase but Linus says he can’t take it, as he did not turn up for that last rendezvous: it was Mayday. He goes to see Caitlin, who is babbling about her sister coming back, crying, and saying to Linus that he will not see her as she is again. Fiona has gone to the police station, to confess all she knows.
We now see a replay of what happened that fateful day. Alan met Hattie and told her that her father had been in an accident. He took her in his car, and when she got suspicious and tried to phone her sister he hit her and knocked her out. Interspersed with this replay we hear the sound of police sirens as Alan and Fiona sit in their garden: his time is almost up. She forces the confession out of him. He explains that Hattie used her powers to put a curse on him, so that he would not be able to sexually satisfy his wife. In the flashback we see him take Hattie into the forest to collect herbs which will, he says, lift the curse, but she says it’s all in his head: she has no powers.
He doesn’t believe her and they move deeper into the wood. He goes to cut off a lock of her hair but she breaks free and runs (the scene we saw at the beginning), but he catches her and drags her back. She tries to tell him again that the spell only worked because he believed in it. She tells him that if he kills her she will come back for him, and this pushes him to strangle her as Malcolm Spicer looks on from his concealed bird hide. In the present, a squadron of cop cars fly down the road, sirens blasting, lights flashing. Justice is coming on swift rubber tyres.
The cars pull up --- and the cops arrest Everett! Evidence is found in his house, the lock of hair planted by Fiona when she was there. The bitch has decided to protect her scumbag murderer husband and frame Everett because of what he did to her in 1992. Alan goes to retrieve the hair but can’t find it. Fiona tells him not to worry about it. She tells him there’s nothing more important than her family. As Everett is taken away by the police Linus’s world crashes down, and there’s not even Caitlin there to talk to. Sandra turns out to be more of a friend than Gail had given her credit for, letting her stay in her house in Cornwall as her own is being repossessed by the bank. Gail takes Malcolm’s ashes and mixes them in with the food for the dog…
Caitlin dyes her hair, and puts on Hattie’s clothes, the same dress she was wearing on Mayday. She takes her bike and as Alan and his family are out having a picnic, she rides by, stops her bike and stares at them, pointing at Alan, scaring the crap out of them and maybe making Fiona think that justice has come back to find them, after all. The evidence against Everett goes mysteriously missing and so the cops can’t hold him, but it was flimsy at best and would never have secured a conviction.
QUOTES
Everett: “I have been protecting you all your life you ungrateful little ****!”
Linus: “What are you talking about?”
Everett: “You killed her, Linus. You. You killed your mother.”
Seth: “No! I saw her, cradled in the tree of life! She was not dead! She’s changing! She’ll come back!”
Mr. Sutton: “Do you think he (Seth) did it?”
Steve: “There’s a side of him that’s capable of anything.”
Angie (to Steve): “You destroy everything. You kill what you love.”
Neighbour: “I think a tree is quite a nice place to put his ashes.”
Gail: “I don’t think a tree is very appropriate in the circumstances, is it?”
THE CULPRIT: SUSPECTS FINALE
Now we know who did it, and we can sort out the “suspects”, and see how they fit into the story, and why they were initially considered to have been responsible.
Alan
He is the killer, which is interesting really as of all the suspects bar Linus he had emerged as the least likely, even after Malcolm’s death. Apart from his cock-and-bull story about some internal investigation that was unexpectedly dropped, and the lock of hair in the attic he has not done or said really anything to make us think it could have been him. Clever really: the killer keeps a low profile and lets others fall under suspicion. Also, the fact that he is a cop makes him even less likely. But now we see that he killed Hattie in a rage because he believed she had cast a spell on him that would not allow him to make love to his wife.
Malcolm
Apart from his own financial problems and his predeliction for watching couples make love, Malcolm’s only involvement in the murder of Hattie is now seen to have been that he was a silent witness. He saw everything, but whether he was just scared to come forward, as he would have to explain what he was doing there in the first place and his own dubious record would have come to light, or whether some part of him rejoiced that the woman who had ruined him was getting what she deserved, is unclear. It could even be that the murder turned him on, though he does throw up afterwards.
Everett
Seen now to be innocent, and not so bad a father as we had been led to believe. He has been protecting his son against the awful truth about the death of his mother, and though he did something to Fiona --- we can only assume, though it’s never confirmed, this was to make her pregnant with Charlotte and not stand by her --- this is all he is guilty of. But because of her hatred for him, the ex-police woman violates her principles and ethics and frames him. He is later released, as the evidence goes missing.
Seth
We can probably assume Seth had nothing to do with Hattie’s murder, as he has been provided with an alibi for the time of the killing. But he was a suspect, and that was enough for her father, who exacts his own brutal --- and misinformed --- justice upon the troubled man.
Steve
Had nothing to do with it either, so far as we can see. Just a small man in a small town trying to make his small life a little better by temporarily making himself a bigger man, and hoping to regain the son he had lost.
Linus
Was never really a suspect, just a troubled kid around whom all this madness swirled like an out-of-control fairground ride. In the end though it’s almost as if two people are murdered, as he loses his chance to have a relationship with Caitlin when she takes on the persona of her murdered sister.
A FINAL TWIST
One of the things that totally blew me off the planet with this programme was the last twist. As I said at the beginning, there are so many viable suspects that it’s pretty much impossible to decide who is innocent and who is guilty, and as the series goes on deeper and darker secrets are revealed, some leading to answers, some asking more questions. But even when the killer is revealed and it looks like the law is closing in on him, there’s one final plot twist as Fiona frames Everett, leaving the lock of hair in his house so that he will be accused of the murder. However this reasoning is fatally flawed, as I will discuss in the next section. Even so, it’s a development I had not expected or anticipated. As the cop cars close in, and the scene alternates between their approach and Fiona and Alan in the garden, I expected at any moment the flashing blue lights to pull up outside their house and Alan to be arrested. When it’s Everett’s house they descend on, it really took my breath away. Just when you think everything is wrapped up in a neat little bundle, the killer is unmasked and caught and you’re just waiting for the feeling of the collar and the end credits to roll, this amazing little suspense thriller throws you a complete curve and demonstrates once more what a singularly unique drama this is.
FATAL FLAWS
Before I close this, I’d just like to examine the frankly often glaring plot holes in the last parts of the story. One is the fact that there is no explanation for Hattie’s being found up a tree. Alan is no hunk; he’s not a weed but he’s no stronger-looking than the average man. So how did he manage to get her body way up into the branches of the tree in which it was found? Or, did Seth do that? He called it “the tree of life”. Did he intend to try to engineer Hattie’s return to life by in effect offering her to the forest gods? It’s a rather large flaw in the plot that’s never answered or resolved, or even addressed, and yet it becomes the single reason for Malcolm being cleared of her murder.
As to the evidence found in Everett’s house: well firstly did the cops not wonder why it was in an evidence bag? Not to mention that if they dusted it for fingerprints they would find Fiona’s on the bag but not those of Everett, proving he never touched it. And what sort of evidence is that anyway? If he was proved to have known Hattie, perhaps even have had an affair with her, could she not have given him a lock of her hair? It’s not like it was covered in blood or anything. Flimsy at best, and the fact that it goes missing is probably the best thing for the cops, as by itself it would never hold up in court, and other than that the police have nothing else to link him to the murder.
There’s Linus’s accusations of course, but he retracts these and admits he was wrong. And if the relationship between Everett and Fiona is explored in court, it’s going to become quite clear that they had a fling, and that this is quite obviously the work of a woman who is framing her ex-lover for pure reasons of revenge and anger. No, there’s no case against Everett and I’m surprised the cops arrest him on such paltry evidence.
Final notes:
It amazed me too that someone who was made out to have such high notions of ethics and principles as Fiona would, having discovered her husband to be a murderer, protect him and not only that but frame an innocent man. He may have hurt her, but Everett is no murderer, and she knows this. Not only that, she knows she is being an accessory after the fact and is also seeking to pervert the course of justice. I thought she was an ex-cop? She is so worried and concerned about Hattie, and devastated when her body turns up: how can she now defile her memory like this? Shielding her murderer and framing a man Hattie was apparently once infatuated with? I had hoped that the final scene would be Alan, Fiona or both suffering a heart attack after seeing “Hattie” return, but that’s left up to our imaginations. One thing is for certain though: neither are likely to sleep easily ever again after this.
One final mystery remains though. Caitlin as Hattie singles out Alan and his family to accuse, but as far as she and everyone else knows, Everett was the one charged, and though Linus would have told her he was innocent --- if he managed to see her after the arrest --- even he did not know about Alan. Nobody did, other than Fiona. And Hattie. So was that really Hattie’s spirit come back in the body of her sister, taking her over so as to have her revenge, keep the promise or threat she made to Alan just before he squeezed the life out of her body?