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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Waking the Dead: Series 8, Episodes 7 and 8: Endgame

9:25 PM / Television / No Comments

Written by Daniel Percival and Andrew Holden; Directed by Daniel Percival

* WARNING * Spoilers ahead! * WARNING *

The overused phrase "rollercoaster ride" is not one I'd normally use for Waking the Dead, but it certainly applies to the two-part finale to the current series, which ended last night. As always, my compulsion to ruin everything for myself led to me reading the officially released spoilers, at which point I promptly became worried for more than one reason. First of all, it all sounded rather silly and, in several respects, a tad clichéd. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it strongly suggested that it was "end of the line" time for a least one of the series regulars, if not the series as a whole.

I shouldn't have worried. Having now seen the episodes, I see no reason to suspect that Waking the Dead will not be back at the same time next year. Furthermore, it was a corker of a finale - the best since Series 4.

Psychopathic serial killer Linda Cummings (Ruth Gemmell), who the team succeeded in locking up in the previous series, begins taunting Boyd from the psychiatric hospital in which she is incarcerated. She succeeds in having a severed finger sent to him, along with a note asking "Who killed Sandra White?" The finger is revealed to belong to the aforementioned Ms. White, who was an inmate at the same hospital as Linda and vanished off the face of the earth shortly after being released. Linda isn't just doing this for the fun of it - she has something to gain from this, but her endgame is a mystery to all and sundry, which worries Grace but fascinates the impetuous Boyd. She warns him not to get involved, but personal commitments mean that she is unable work on the case, leading to her calling in a temporary replacement, Dr. Jackie Cochran (Gina McKee), who has studied Linda extensively and has a secret of her own. As Boyd is drawn deeper into Linda's web, she sets her endgame in motion, which could have lasting consequences for the team...

Far-fetched? Yes. A bit clichéd? Almost certainly, but I'm willing to forgive a lot of any show that can keep me rapt for two hours and leave me thirsting for more. Linda Cummings is basically a Hannibal Lecter figure and I'm a little uncertain as to just how realistic her portrayal is - I don't doubt that brilliant mad(wo)men exist, but I fancy that characters like Lecter and Linda are heavily romanticised and, in Linda's case, not the sort of person you'd expect to find interred in the average London psychiatric facility. Does it matter? Not really, because the episode as a whole is brilliantly constructed and Linda is a compelling character, ably played by a solid actress, Ruth Gemmell. Gemmell actually appeared back in the Series 2 episode Special Relationships (another corker), in a completely different role, and while part of me dislikes the re-use of recognisable actors in different roles on the same show almost as much as blatant retconning (see the Joe/Luke fiasco), I'm ultimately glad they gave the part to her, because she's so bloody good. I'm not going to claim that her performance is on par with that of Anthony Hopkins as Lecter, but there are definite similarities, particularly with regard to the fact that they can both present themselves as seductive and monstrously evil at the same time. She's the definitive manipulator: someone whose true motive remains hidden until the very end and is considerably darker and more disturbing than anything you could guess (well, unless, like me, you read the spoilers). Linda's eventual goal, you see, is to force Boyd to become the same sort of monster that she is - again, it's not exactly original, but it works because we've seen Boyd take himself to the edge so many times before that, by this stage, we really do believe him to be capable of going past the point of no return, if provoked sufficiently. This is, after all, the man who famously almost drowned a suspect in an attempt to wheedle a confession out of him, and just last week left a man to be killed because he knew he couldn't successfully prosecute him. Given the right circumstances, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine Boyd stepping up to the plate and actually committing murder.

What makes this all so delicious is the fact that it is thoroughly grounded in psychology rather than science. Waking the Dead, in its heyday, gave equal attention to both, but I was always more interested in the former than the latter, and I was dismayed to see it being given such short shrift in more recent series. With End of the Night and now this episode, that trend has well and truly been reversed in Series 8. It would be going too far to consider Boyd and Linda two sides of the same coin - he takes himself to the edge because he craves justice, whereas she... well, it's not clear what she has to gain from her behaviour, beyond a sadistic form of personal amusement - but as adversaries, they're truly well-matched. This is, to date, the only time Waking the Dead has ever brought back a previous villain, and they certainly picked a good one. I wasn't overly taken by her in her initial appearance in the Series 7 episode Sins, but she certainly convinced me tonight.

As for whether Boyd did succumb... well, it's actually a bit open-ended. Linda's deal was "a life for a life" - if he killed for her, Grace would survive. (The person he was to kill was the woman who provided his son, Joe/Luke, with the drugs he used to fatally overdose.) Boyd's hands, at present, remain clean, and Grace lives to fight another day (although whether or not she'll beat the cancer with which she was diagnosed in this episode remains to be seen), but the cliffhanger ending poses more questions than it answers. It's almost certain that Linda is dead, having fallen from the roof of a multi-storey building, but the extent of Boyd's culpability remains unclear. Did he accidentally drop her, or did he deliberately let her go? Given that Waking the Dead has never been particularly big on continuity, I'm not confident that we'll ever get a satisfying answer, but we did get some real development in terms of Boyd's character. After all, when push came to shove, he couldn't actually kill another human being - not even the woman responsible for his son's death, not even when she told him she wanted him to do it, and not even when he thought it meant losing Grace. Boyd is, ultimately, not the monster Linda wanted him to be. His victory over her is, fundamentally, a mental one.

Series 8's high point remains the magnificent End of the Night, but Endgame was a far better finale than I ever expected it to be. In spite of the crushingly disappointing Substitute, Series 8 as a whole has been a significant improvement on the last couple of years, and I'm now firmly of the opinion that the show has well and truly turned itself around. Once they start to go downhill, few shows can manage to claw their way back to the top, but Waking the Dead has done it. It's still nor clear what sort of shape the team will be in come Series 9, but I can't wait to find out, and the prospect of it being another year before the show is on our screens again is, at present, almost too much to bear. Take a bow, guys. You really pulled it out of the bag.

PS. That said, I have to dispute producer Colin Wratten's claim that the overarching theme of Series 8 was "strong women facing adversity". I could just about have bought it if he'd added "and being defeated" to the end of that statement, because I saw precious little evidence of it in a season in which (a) a lead female character suffered an off-screen death by DVT, (b) a rape victim murdered her attacker and presumably ended up in jail as a result, (c) another female lead faffed around with a suspect, leading to the case against him being inadmissible, and (d) a female psychopath fell to her death while Grace, the matriarch of the team, spent the bulk of the episode confined to a hospital bed or helplessly waiting for Boyd to come and rescue her. I don't know about you, but none of these scenarios strike me as being particularly big on the "girl power" quotient. (As someone put it in a comment on the article I linked to, "strong woman" appears to mean "victim".) Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against any of those stories per se (well, apart from the cop-out "death by DVT" affair), but if you're going to make statements like that, you ought to be able to deliver on them.

PPS. Just a couple more random observations about the season as a whole:

• While I sincerely hope Sue Johnston isn't going anywhere, if she does end up leaving, as replacements go they could do a hell of a lot worse than Gina McKee.
   
• The new girl, Kat, ultimately gelled nicely with the existing team, and I already like her a lot more than Stella.
   
• Spencer, on the other hand, no longer seems to serve any particular purpose, and I can definitely see the writers ditching him permanently come the next series... in which case, I doubt I'd be sorry to see him go, as the character has never done much for me and has, I feel, been taken as far as he can go.
   
• Finally, I noticed that, as of this series, they've switched composers. I was always a big fan of Joe Campbell and Paul Hart's score, and the new music, of the generic "action cop show" variety, just doesn't have the same effect. I particularly miss the repetitive but strangely hypnotic eight-note signature piece that always seemed to play when Frankie/Felix/Eve was at work in the lab.

Holby connections: Andrew Holden has written extensively for both Casualty and Holby City, and Barbara Marten (Penny) played Sister Eve Montgomery during Casualty's twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth series.

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