What a finale!
This Sunday I watched one of the best final episodes of a TV series ever.
Over the years there have been some iconic TV shows that I have loved. I’ve obsessed with them and watched them again and again and read all about them online. And then the final series/episodes were rubbish. Sometimes, I think that writes know how to create suspense and intrigue, but don’t know how to round it all together and conclude things properly. Special mentions here go to Line of Duty, Game of Thrones and Lost.
Sally Wainwright knows how to do this and managed to write the perfect ending for Happy Valley.
We only recently started watching the show, binge watching the first couple of series in a just a few weeks. We caught up with series three as it was shown and this was annoying as we meant we had to wait a week between episodes. But, each week the episodes of series three were worth waiting for.
The finale was excellent. It finally gave Catherine and Tommy chance to confront each other. You actually began to feel sorry for Tommy at one point. And then he told Catherine that he forgave her. He forgave her?! No way would Catherine be having that.
One of the things to love about Happy Valley is the use of humour and character quirks inbetween all of the dark. When Tommy had met his fate, the way Catherine told her sister, Clare, that they’d had a bit of a tussle was the humour that we all needed to get over what we’d just watched.
It was great to see Ryan coming of age and Catherine’s realisation that he was not going to be like his dad, but be a happy, well-adjusted, pretty flipping normal kid, was beautiful.
Catherine managed to catch Tommy and Darius at the same time and that left the dodgy school teacher and the dodgy pharmacist remaining. It turned out that dodgy Mr Epworth had been caught blackmailing students for photos, which was just creepy, although not entirely unexpected. And just as I thought the dodgy pharmacist had got away with it, Catherine gave the detective the information needed to bring him down as well.
The finale seemed real and there were no unexplained moments (although I’d have liked to see Daniel, Ann and Neville one more time).
I think we all need to be more Catherin Cawood. I found her inspiring: honest, selfless, intuitive, hard working, formidable, and funny.
The perfect ending to a fantastic TV show. Perfect.