Season Two
Episodes One to Three
The extended recap at the beginning felt exciting to watch. The First Season still resonating in my head, I was reminded of how near-perfect a series I was rejoining.
Five minutes into Season Two, I found myself squirming in my chair. Irritated. Disconnected from the events onscreen. And I had to resist the urge to simply hit “Stop” on the remote control and turn it off, intent on remembering the series that had charmed me with each of its first thirteen episodes.
The reason for my sudden change of heart? This shark-jumping moment?
Several minutes into Episode One, a car was seen coming along the drive and pulling up outside Ash Park. Now, my first observation about the car had to do with the badge. A Renault Mégane - even a CC model - seems quite an ordinary car to be at Ash Park. Nice as it is, it doesn’t have the brand appeal of the Jaguar or the MG driven by the Blighs. I wondered who could driving this previously unseen car. And then there was the pop music blasting out from the car hi fi, which didn’t seem very appropriate. Then it hit me: A Renault Mégane?! A 2010s car? Pop music? And then a young blonde woman leapt out and up the steps to enter… in contemporary (that is, 2010s) dress. What the hell…?!
Jarring as this was, it got worse. The young blonde woman was Arianwen Parkes-Lockwood, who plays Olivia. Except, it transpires as the scene goes on, she’s Samantha: Olivia’s
granddaughter. And she’s here to interview the elderly Sarah (still apparently played by Marta Dusseldorp, though it’s hard to tell with the abundance of prosthetic wrinkles) sixty years after the events we’ve been watching.
Samantha is apparently writing a book about Sarah’s life. And their chronological walk down memory lane conveniently picks up at exactly the point we rejoin the series.
So, is everything we’ve watched up until now supposed to be part of some woman’s memoirs. Have we been taking a detached, nostalgic look back at someone’s life? Because I might not have got so invested in events in the 1950s if I’d known that to be the case.
In the space of one short scene, Samantha comments on ALL the storylines (“You mentioned a body in the river. I couldn’t find any record of it”; “James had just started his treatment… How did Gran take it?”; “[Anna] was moving out to be with Gino. When did she find out [her father] was Jack Duncan?”; “You didn’t say what Roy felt about you leaving the farm”...). This causes old Sarah to flash “back” to the 1950s to see these events (not least, Sarah and Roy, having evidently discovered Bert’s body, now weighing it down with chains and sending it back out to the watery depths). But every once in a while we return to 2014. To elderly Sarah and Olivia’s blonde granddaughter. On one occasion, the ringing of granddaughter’s mobile phone interrupts a 1950s scene. And various 2010s niceties such as granddaughter’s laptop can be seen.
There are a few nice touches. Sarah’s maid at Ash Park is named Leah, and I assume is meant to be little Leah Goldberg who in the Fifties had just recovered from her TB.
But for me the bad outweighs the good. Significantly. I go out of my way to avoid spoilers. And I now know that Sarah is at Ash Park in the twenty first century. This suggests she’s Mrs Bligh, even if it’s not explicitly said. So I can probably assume that there’s no need to worry too much about any threat to Sarah and George’s relationship. And there can never be any question of Sarah dying in the Fifties. So there are more doors closed. I’m sure the powers that be can still weave an interesting story with these limitations, but when I invest in a series, it adds to the magic to think that
anything could happen to any of the characters. Now there are certain things that will never be able to happen to 1950s Sarah.
It’s also threatened to change the way I view the series. From the first episode of Season One, I accepted 1953 as that series’ present. But is 1950s Sarah present day Sarah, and 2010s Sarah a future version? Or is 2010s Sarah the present day version, with 1950s Sarah as the flashback? The fact that I now even need to consider such things takes me out of the story, diluting the whole experience
If the First Season had employed this method, I could have accepted it a little more easily. But now they’re changing the way the story is told. Fixing something that isn’t broken. And this flash-forward serves no purpose at all, other than novelty. What we see and are told doesn’t enhance the story we’re invested in. Nothing on-screen in the Mégane scenes is real for the characters in 1953/4, because it hasn’t happened. So why should I care? It’s entering the realm of science fiction. The only new information is stuff that I don’t need to know and would prefer not to know. We’re not even given information about 1953 that we couldn’t have worked out ourselves from throwaway dialogue in the present. Damn it. I mean the past. Or do I?!
The “flash forward” has muddied the water and shaken my investment in the series. All for the sake of being “clever”. If I was watching this when it first aired on TV, this is something that might have prompted me to write my first TV-related “Disgusted of Milton Keynes” letter since I wrote to the BBC in the Eighties demanding they return
Knots Landing to prime time.
The good news: this silly 21st Century stuff seems to be a one-off. Although I say this tentatively, since I’m only three episodes in. Episodes Two and Three haven’t used it, and I really hope that will be that. Though I’m not sure I’ll be able to fully enjoy this series for a while, knowing I could be taken out of the story at any moment.
continued...
