Quirke: "The Silver Swan"
Man this show is depressing. That said, I liked this episode better than the first, simply because it felt more like a straightforward whodunit instead of a family conspiracy that Quirke had to unravel. But as with last week, it’s very bleak in tone and sordid in content. Strangely enough, things like murder, drug-abuse, extramarital affairs and blackmail don’t have to be this dark, as depending on the atmosphere they could be part of a light drama - but this is no Miss Marple cosy.
Dealing with the fallout of last week’s revelations (that Phoebe is actually Quirke’s daughter) and the discovery of two dead women (apparently by suicide), both plots eventually intersect when Phoebe becomes entangled with a blackmailer who seduces women, gets them hooked on pills, sends them to get nude portraits done in exchange for more, and mails the photographs to their husbands, threatening to publish them if they don’t pay up. And before you cry “spoiler!”, rest assured that all this is spelt out pretty clearly almost right from the start of the episode. In fact, the audience knows what’s going on long before Quirke catches up, and what tension exists is derived from the knowledge that Phoebe is getting drawn into Leslie White’s trap whilst her guardian’s attention is elsewhere.
As with last week, the pacing continues to be pretty awful, and again I think that the ninety-minute run-time was a mistake. By my reckoning both episodes could have easily been cut down to the forty-five minute mark, resulting in more suspenseful plotting. An even stranger narrative decision is that the investigation into the women’s deaths continues well after the climactic end to the man responsible for their demise, giving the last fifteen minutes of the episode a rather tacked-on feel. Shuffle things around a little, and lose all the establishing shots/arguments at the dinner table/pointless conversations between various characters, and you’d have a much smoother, swifter story.
As it is, I’m annoyed that we got so many extraneous scenes, but not the satisfaction of watching Leslie White getting beaten up.
Speaking of whom, Lee Ingleby is a great actor with fantastic range - I’ve seen him play the sweetest characters imaginable (Gustave in Ever After; Mole in The Wind in the Willows) to the vilest (Vic Tyler in Life on Mars; Derek Spratley in Jonathan Creek), but I’m not entirely sure he was suited for the role of Leslie White. He made Leslie suitably suave and charming, but...well, he wasn’t hugely attractive and I found him way too slimy to believe he could pull in so many women - then again, I had the benefit of knowing what he was really up to.
Does anyone else feel sorry for Mal Griffin? I think we’re supposed to think he’s a real jerk, but honestly - I don’t blame him for being pissed that his brother and wife went and told his daughter her true parentage without even consulting him. That’s a pretty big betrayal.
SPOILERS BELOW
I liked the reveal of the killer, especially regarding the irony surrounding his situation: that he was the one supplying Hakim Kreutz with illicit medication so that he could treat his wife to expensive gifts, completely unaware that he was losing her because of her addiction to the drugs he was selling. By the end I felt sorry for him, but it also illustrates the psychological danger of believing in the Madonna/Whore Complex, and how this man in particular just couldn’t cope with the idea that his wife wasn’t the “angel” that he’d built her up to be.
I also like that Quirke’s life parallels the cases he’s working on, first in Phoebe’s secret adoption in the last episode, and here in his affair with Sarah. In both cases he finds it difficult to pass judgment on those committing the same “crimes”, for he knows how close he treads to the exact same behaviour (in particulars, if not motivation). The best scene would have to be Quirke asking his father for the services of Costigan to “deter” Leslie away from Phoebe, to which his father indignantly tells him that in doing so, he’s no longer allowed to judge him for his own transgressions.
It’s interesting firstly because we rarely get to see what is ostensibly a good guy paying a hired thug to beat up a man (even one as deserving of it as Leslie), and because it slots neatly into what appears to be the central theme of the show: passing judgement. Keeping in mind that Michael Gambon’s character is referred to by his family as “the judge” (since that was his career for many years), the audience and various characters are often asked to pass judgement on various situations. Do we judge the convent for shipping so many babies to Boston? Do we judge Garret Griffon for his involvement in his own infant daughter’s death? What about Deirdre having an affair and posing nude to acquire more drugs? Her husband certainly judged her for it.
And with that in mind...
Can we please not judge Phoebe for her decisions?
Because I’m dreading fandom’s reaction to her next week. Look guys: she’s just found out that the man she loved was her father, she lost her virginity to an abusive blackmailer, and her mother has suddenly died. If she’s not 100% sweet and charming and obliging to Colin Morgan’s character, could we PLEASE just cut her some slack instead of calling her a bitch and demanding her head? Please?