Wayward Pines (2015) s01e01 – Where Paradise Is Home

My favorite part of this episode is when M. Night Shyamalan’s name comes up for the director credit because there have already been so many terrible shots, it seemed like it had to be a named terrible. Shyamalan’s direction throughout the episode will be godawful, both with his composition and the direction of the actors. For instance, if I never see Shannyn Sossamon in anything again, I’ll be fine, and it’s entirely Shyamalan’s infinitely lousy direction of her performance.

He even manages to get a lousy performance from Melissa Leo, which I didn’t think was possible. At least, not this wretched a performance.

Shyamalan’s also one of the show’s executive producers, with Chad Hodge getting the creating credit. The show’s based on novels by Blake Crouch, which I haven’t and would need to be paid to read at this point, so it’s unclear who wrote all the terrible dialogue. I’m assuming Hodge. Though maybe Shyamalan gave the stars license.

Speaking of stars, “Wayward Pines” has a motley crew of “used to be movie stars” traipsing across the screen, starting with Matt Dillon. He’s a Secret Service agent on a secret mission somewhere in the Pacific Northwest who wakes up injured and stumbles into Wayward Pines, Idaho. Outside the one Black guy—Terrence Howard as the sheriff—the show’s strictly as white and exclusionary as you’d expect from real Idaho.

Except Dillon soon discovers Wayward Pines is no regular town. For one thing, there are no crickets, rather noise boxes making cricket sounds.

He’s trying to get in touch with Sossamon, his somewhat estranged wife (Dillon stepped out on her with partner Carla Gugino, who he’s now on assignment looking for), but she never seems to get any of his messages. He doesn’t call her cell phone because he’s a shitty husband and doesn’t know the number. All of his personal possessions are missing, so it’s a little weird when everyone just takes it at face value he’s not lying about his identity.

Though we find out this episode while things aren’t what they seem, some things—people being out to get Dillon—are actually happening.

The only friend Dillon makes in town is bartender Juliette Lewis, who fronts him a cheeseburger and the address to a mysterious house where he makes a horrifying discovery. Sort of. If Shyamalan could direct, if Hodge could write, if Dillon could run the show.

Dillon’s a bad lead. I’m not sure how much of it’s Shyamalan or the writing, but he’s a charm black hole. He’s not as bad as the forced quirky going on around him, like Leo, but he’s not good. He’s a little better than Lewis, but Lewis’s performance feels like someone’s constantly distracting her from doing her job like Shyamalan was yelping every time she had a delivery and throwing her off.

Maybe he was chirping like a cricket.

Howard’s better than anyone else. He seems to know it’s bad.

Reed Diamond comes in towards the end and does fine. He’s apparently impervious or just knows how to work on bad TV.

The worst part of the episode might come at the very end, when the show gives away the mystery, promising the rest of the show will just be watching a bunch of unlikeable characters poorly acted.

Krisha (2015, Trey Edward Shults)

Krisha is an eighty-minute film with a present action of maybe twelve hours. It’s about a family’s black sheep (Krisha Fairchild) coming to Thanksgiving after some time away. There’s no big exposition dump—it isn’t until the third act the film confirms the basic information the characters have all been dealing with—and for the first half or so, Krisha gets away with it. Right until the third act, when director, writer, and editor Shults brings on the drama, Krisha seems like it may end up somewhere special.

Or at least somewhere ambitious and not predictable.

After the third act, it’s clear the rest of the film was never going to add up, which brings it down in hindsight. It was all busy work to keep the audience distracted.

Of course, since the streaming service we watched Krisha on felt the need to put a “confirm” button under a warning about particularly adult content, I was watching the film with an impending sense of dread. Some of it is because Shults employs distorted angles, a noisy non-diegetic soundtrack, and a fragmented narrative. But also because it all seems like it’s building to something extraordinary. It’s not just going to be a Thanksgiving drama about this obnoxious privileged white family; for much of the runtime, when nothing’s going on except turkey preparation, you can just hear them talking about doing their own research on vaccines or maybe complaining about critical race theory.

When we finally find out what the movie’s all about, almost an hour in, it’s doesn’t derail the film. Shults could take it someplace. Only it’s not a character study of Krisha Fairchild; it’s about how shitty she is to her family, apparently. We get a sense of the hostility from Bill Wise, who tries bonding with Fairchild over how much he hates her sister (his wife) but still stays with her, and when Fairchild’s not receptive, he lashes out with some white male truth bombs.

The third act mainly falls apart because Robyn Fairchild—presumably Krisha’s real-life sister—isn’t good. And because Shults starts playing with the aspect ratio too much, he goes from 4:3 to 2.35:1 to 4:3 for sure, and maybe there’s some 16:9 in there. It’s distracting in the third act, particularly because Drew Daniels does a terrible job lighting it.

For a literal family affair, with the occasional professional actor (Wise and Chris Doubek, both of whom aren’t as good as the non-professionals), Krisha’s impressive. Shults’s editing is outstanding. Fairchild’s performance is pretty good until she becomes the film’s villain. Turns out we weren’t supposed to empathize with her coming into this passively hostile environment filled with bland white people—who make her do the entire Thanksgiving dinner herself while the men all do macho shit—but instead empathize with the family giving her another chance.

I mean, Krisha’s a movie where a wife (Olivia Grace Applegate) complains to a husband (Alex Dobrenko) about how she’d prefer to be enthusiastic about their sex life, and he’s the good guy for telling her to shut up and put out. The whole movie can basically be summed up as the “white, cishets aren’t okay.” Also, upper-middle-class people are energy vampires, which doesn’t seem to be Shults’s intent.

Though you also see someone prod grandma Billie Fairchild into performing from off-camera. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s in real life and apparently not entirely aware she was in a movie. It tracks with the film’s interesting cognitive dissonance about personal accountability, responsibility, and consent.

But, you know, for an indie white guy movie, it’s okay. Like sixty percent impressive low budget, fifteen percent too bland, fifteen percent bad. Fairchild’s performance would be outstanding if she weren’t a caricature, but Shults uses caricature to get away with the non-professional cast. But, sure, technically, it’s successful. Shults’s direction’s okay, and that cutting’s phenomenal. If only his writing weren’t manipulative and deceptive.

Though, who knows, since the entire thing ends up hinging on Robyn Fairchild’s performance, if she were better, things might work out.

Miss Hokusai (2015, Hara Keiichi)

Miss Hokusai is the story of real person Katsushika Ōi. Well, stories of real person Katsushika Ōi. The anime is an episodic memoir mostly about Ōi (voiced by Anne Watanabe) and her younger sister, O-Nao (voiced by Shimizu Shion). The film doesn’t specify but they’re half-sisters, daughters to famous Japanese Edo period artist Katsushika Hokusai (Matsushige Yutaka). Ōi is also an artist, working under her father’s tutelage and when the movie’s not about her and her blind, sickly sister, it’s about her and her dad’s other slightly eccentric (and obviously all male) students.

Oh, and her love life. Almost the entire second act is about Ōi not being good at the erotica art because she’s a virgin. Except it’s all done in fades-to-black-in-between episodes (to the point you can tell when one is running too long), which would be more effective if it had a lyrical structure instead of just a herky-jerky epical.

The problem with Hokusai—other than the disaster third act—is the narrative distance. It’s not a character study of Ōi, it’s a mildly cloying look at the world she inhabits. Someone—screenwriter Maruo Miho or original mangaka Sugiura Hinako—utterly punts on the character study approach, which leads to the father ending up the most compelling character (and performance by a voice actor). The most compelling character overall is the sick sister because she’s literally just there for a combination of sympathy and period empathy (the kid’s convinced she’s going to someday end up in Hell because she’s blind). Shimizu’s good as the kid. None of the performances are bad, but Shimizu’s good enough to stand out. Otherwise it’s just about waiting for the father to speak because it’s always words of wisdom; Matsushige does a great job with it.

There are a lot of effective sequences once Ōi starts showing some agency (she’s got to worry about her dad’s professional contracts because he’s an artiste and can’t be bothered with money, wives, or blind daughters—but in a soulful way… they really should’ve gotten Mickey Rourke to do a dub); anyway. The directors do an all right job with a lot of it, leveraging a bunch of CGI backdrops—but not bad until the end when it’s too late anyway—and for a while Hokusai’s somewhat jarring rising action is effective.

Until the third act when the movie gives the best stuff to the father and reduces Ōi to a narrator of his biography, then her own. In that order, obviously. The finish is reductive and truncated in the worst ways. Then there’s some terrible CGI. Plus rock music.

Hokusai’s music is a whole thing. There’s rock to show how Ōi is really a modern girl living in nineteenth century Japan. Except the generic rock music’s for some eighties movie about white kids learning to dance in rural America. The rest of Fuuki Harumi’s music is fine; I wouldn’t be surprised if the rock was added for the American releases (even the Japanese language ones). Though I also wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t.

The animation’s solid. There are some highlights when visualizing the painting of the actual historical artists’ paintings.

After a very slow burn, Miss Hokusai goes into its third act at a reasonable high and then belly flops. It could’ve been a success of cloying melodrama. Instead it’s just respectably unsuccessful.

Concussion (2015, Peter Landesman)

Most of Concussion is inoffensive Oscar bait. Only for the dudes though. And only for the actors. None of the technicals. Will Smith is the main Oscar bait; he’s a crusading African immigrant coroner who’s a medical super genius who wholesomely communes with his cadavers before respectfully cutting them up. The film shows Smith talking to the bodies a few times and it’s always a kind of othering to it. But it’s not actually important either, just part of a red herring of a subplot involving Mike O'Malley as a coworker who doesn’t like Smith for being smart and African. O’Malley’s pretty bad. Like… Concussion’s problem isn’t usually the acting—even though no one’s actually great and there are big asterisks on the scenery chewers too—but O’Malley’s bad. Like. He drains the energy out of his scenes.

And some of the problem with that energy drain is—like most everything—director Landesman’s bad screenplay. Smith’s effort in his performance—he’s clearly taking it seriously even though things are not working out, especially in the herky-jerky third act when reality not being adequately dramatic enough really takes the steam out of Smith’s hero’s quest or whatever—but through it all Smith at least is doing the work. He’s not great. He’s not even good, but not for lack of trying; the script’s quite bad at the characterization and character development, which is a big freaking problem given the anticlimactic finish to the film; it’s a de facto character study only it didn’t study its characters at all.

Though at least Smith gets some decent Oscar bait monologues. The one where he starts tearing up as Arliss Howard—who’s absurdly highly billed for a glorified cameo—is an astounding prick to him would be effective if someone else were directing the movie, even with the script. Because Landesman isn’t just writing bland and bland extra dialogue, he’s also directing and calling his direction bland would be a compliment. It’s often bad.

Cinematographer Salvatore Totino and composer James Newton Howard get some points for mostly making it look like Landesman isn’t completely incompetent but the times when they aren’t there to cover… Landesman’s abject incompetency is still very obvious.

So with a bad script, terrible direction, an unsuccessful flex from Smith in the lead, not to mention the movie—which criticizes the NFL, not really criticizing them too hard; poor Gugu Mbatha-Raw is a Hitchockian damsel out getting stalked—maybe—and it wrecking havoc on her while Smith gets to hang out with the boys and drink. The boys are Alec Baldwin and Albert Brooks. Brooks is why Concussion makes it long enough to get to Smith’s frequent Oscar bait scenes. Brooks is Smith’s mentor and buddy. Their relationship is more believable than Brooks’s makeup, which is sixties “Star Trek” bad yet somehow still lightyears better than David Morse’s… young man makeup. They’ve got sixty-something Morse in a bunch of make-up to look like fifty-year old. I’m not sure how they convinced Morse putting on five pounds of makeup would get him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting—in a stunt part—but maybe he just got a really nice swimming pool.

Anyway. Brooks. Brooks is somehow great. I mean, he’s not, because it’s a poorly written part in a poorly written movie but when it’s Brooks, you can believe Smith as the smartest man alive. You can also believe in when it’s Smith and Baldwin, but only because Baldwin’s unbelievable as a former NFL doctor turned whistleblower. He’s still somewhat amusing in the part, but more often than not it’s for hearing him still incapable of executing any sort of Southern accent with ability.

But Brooks. Brooks is kind of great.

Mbatha-Raw has fourteen to twenty lines so it barely matters what she does in the film. She’s there so Smith isn’t talking to himself in exposition dumps, instead Mbatha-Raw gets to hear them. She’s fine at hearing them. Likable even, especially since she gets the short end so often in the film thanks to Landesman.

The movie’s not just deflated in its take on the NFL, but American football in general. Like the real football footage the film constantly uses (though interspersed with shots of Morse sans some of the makeup but in younger man makeup even) is profoundly poorly cut. Baldwin will be comparing football to Shakespeare and the accompanying footage is no different than the footage they use to show the concussions happening.

The jingoism is also a lot. Also Landesman really overdoes it with the religiosity as a motivator for Smith’s resolve. But overdoes it in a special way… putting a lot of it in and then completely watering it down.

Because Landesman’s incompetent.

It’s toothless.

But Smith tries with enough sincerity it carries.

And Brooks is great. Kind of.

Between the two of them, it’s enough to Concussion across the finish. Even if the close is particularly weak.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s03e08 – Death Do Us Part

I didn’t realize until five episodes into Season Three there were only eight episodes this season. I knew it was the final season, but I didn’t realize it was a short final season. Director Daina Reid handles the series finale with aplomb; there’s a list of things the show seems like it’s going to get done in the last episode and then the list of things we hope it’ll get done. Writer Kris Wyld creates a lot of tension between the two, with Ashleigh Cummings and Hugo Johnstone-Burt’s nuptials seemingly the only positive guaranteed element. Not because it’s really part of the plot, just because… well, just because.

But the other inevitability is villain Colin Moody. His vendetta against Essie Davis’s no account, albeit royalty and wealthy father, Pip Miller, is drawing a lot of blood and quite viciously. Moody’s physically imposing, but he has this standing energy about him. Moody’s dangerous in every frame in every scene, even when he’s hanging out with an old friend. Like, sincere friend. It’s incredible what the show’s able to get away with as far as performance sincerity when the viewer’s got more of the facts to Moody’s violence.

There’s also a regular mystery—with Moody somehow involved—with a noted scientist (David James), who plays a character named Tode but it’s pronounced toad so the whole episode is the cast talking about Professor Toad. It’s very Wind in the Willows. Anyway. He gets killed off in some strange way by someone, possibly even local Catholic priest, Dennis Coard, which would be one hell of a twist, wouldn’t it?

Cummings is beside herself—even with everyone in danger, including herself—at the idea of now revealed to be un-Christian to scientists Coard being the one to marry her. It’s very cute. There’s only so much time for Cummings this episode and she does get a very nice finish to her series arc, so the cute little moments are nice to have.

The episode’s so full there’s no time for Miriam Margoyles and Tammy Macintosh didn’t get her episode this season. Having her around more was okay but not a substitute. Ruby Rees never made it back, leaving Jane the either.

As for Essie Davis and Nathan Page… how do the Honorable Phryne Fisher and Inspector Jack Robinson leave things? As successfully as they can. Wyld finds a certain way of framing things to get it done. Maybe not the hoped for, but better than the good enough. I’m sitting here with a smile thinking about it.

It’d be preferable to have more “Miss Fisher’s,” but as is… it’s just right. Enough.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s03e07 – Game, Set & Murder

Given it’s the penultimate episode, I don’t feel too bad about generally picking the murder from the opening scenes. There are just certain “Miss Fisher’s” tropes in play—it’s episode thirty-three overall—and there are certain things the show’s never done and if it’s going to do them, now’s the time.

And I didn’t have any predictions on motive or whatnot. It was just… a sense of how things were going to go.

Essie Davis is throwing a tennis tournament at (away) Aunt Prudence’s estate, hosting old friend Jeremy Lindsay Taylor and his new wife, Lauren Williams. Williams is one of the best tennis players in the country, second only to American Ella Scott Lynch (who’s not American but better than usual with the Aussies playing Americans on the show). Ashleigh Cummings is a big fan of Williams, which leads to some fun awkward scenes.

But another thing the show finally gets around to addressing is whether or not Davis has an actual fears. It finds one for her in the murder method, leading to some more fantastic scenes for Nathan Page and Davis. Speaking of Page and Davis, there’s a really nice subplot about his support of her professionally when they get in trouble thanks to a lurking paparazzi (Fletcher Humphrys). Page also goes out in support for finally back Hugo Johnstone-Burt—was he busy during filming this season or something—as Johnstone-Burt and Cummings get to prepare for their impending nuptials with a little more security.

It’s a complicated plot involving mistaken victim targeting, some women’s rights issues—Australia doesn’t pay for women’s international sports travel but does pay for the men’s—old romances, and so on. There’s also Scott Lynch coming on to Page with an intensity to do rival Davis.

Elizabeth Coleman’s script is thorough and careful—the mystery and red herrings all get unpacked with just the right amount of detail—and the finish is sufficiently complicated for the characters involved. Really good supporting performance from Williams.

And Davis and Page finale is quite cute.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s03e06 – Death at the Grand

It’s a single location mystery, which is always a lot of fun on “Miss Fisher’s.” Though this single location mystery turns out to be an incredibly dangerous one. It’s the local Grand Hotel, which is no longer as grand as it used to be; someone throws the concierge (Nick Mitchell) off the roof and he’s holding onto a bag belong to one Miss Phryne Fisher, which is a big surprise to everyone. Including Essie Davis, who didn’t even know the bag was missing.

It doesn’t take long for Davis and sidekick Nathan Page—seriously, it’s fine, but Page really doesn’t get anything his own this season—to discover the mystery involves theft, gambling, and one Baron Henry Fisher (Pip Miller). Miller’s Davis’s estranged father, who’s supposed to be being responsible with his money but instead losing it in a rigged poker game to intensely creepy poker hustler, Goran D. Kleut.

Kleut wants the money Miller owes him and is apparently willing to get violent to get it. Hotel owner Nell Feeney is little help to the investigation, so Davis installs Ashleigh Cummings in the lobby to actively snoop. And this time, new constable Henry Hammersla is more than willing to learn from Cummings’s superior detecting abilities. Maybe a little bit too willing to learn… especially since Cummings hasn’t heard from Hugo Johnstone-Burt lately.

But while Davis and Fisher are convinced the murder has something to do with hotel-related Feeney, Kleut, or maid Michala Banas, the audience knows it’s creepy Colin Moody. Moody always in the background, lurking, as he starts stalking Davis, who’s got zero idea she ought to be worried about him. Moody’s less creepy than Kleut, which affects the tension, but not necessarily in a bad way—delaying Moody’s extremes just make them all the more effective later on.

Excellent direction from Mat King. There’s a phenomenal poker game sequence and he really does well giving the hotel a personality.

There’s a charming finish and a surprising development in Cummings’s lessons—it starts with her picking out her preferred gun for her adventurer career; plus Miriam Margoyles is around quite a bit, including some wonderfully comic moments.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s03e05 – Death & Hysteria

Even for an episode dealing with institutionalized misogyny, which are often the heaviest “Miss Fisher’s,” Death & Hysteria is close to the heaviest because it’s about a group of women being persecuted and threatened with forced hysterectomies for… enjoying orgasms. Ysabelle Dean’s script never gives a full exposition dump—in fact, the foreshadowing to what’s going on is just an expression from Tammy Macintosh—but once it’s clear what’s actually going on, the whole episode changes gears quite a bit.

It starts with Essie Davis very suspicious of doctors Philip Quast and Damon Gameau, who have set up in Miriam Margolyes’s house and turned it into a sanitarium for women suffering “female hysteria.” Margolyes—Davis’s aunt and one of the show’s most successful recurring characters—is loaning it to them following Quast’s successful care of her son, who’s recently passed away. We met the son in an episode first season. It’s real sad, particularly since we find out about it three weeks or so after his death; we don’t get to see Davis’s mourning, for instance. Instead, she’s just suspicious Quast is taking advantage.

Quast’s immediately suspicious because he and sidekick Gameau don’t charge any fees—they only take donations from their patients, who are exclusively wealthy women. More, once one of the patients dies, it turns out they’re also really big into getting estates left to them. For various reasons, no one is being forthcoming in the investigation—Quast and Gameau immediately lawyer up (a perfectly icky Gareth Reeves)—and Nathan Page’s breaking in a new constable, Henry Hammersla, who screws up the investigative team.

Hammersla believes women are inferior to men and doesn’t think Page ought to be listening to Davis, much less telling him to work with Ashleigh Cummings (Hugo Johnston-Burt doesn’t appear this episode, off somewhere fishing and trying to figure out his life).

It’s a complicated mystery, with lots of unsettling historical details about the “medical” treatment of women in 1920s Australia, high society or not.

The best part of the episode is Margolyes and her mourning arc. The show may’ve skipped the straight drama but integrates its aftermath quite well here, also giving Travis McMahon some to do. Davis had McMahon and Anthony J. Sharpe helping out Margoyles and there’s some wonderful stuff with McMahon and Margoyles.

There’s also a fantastic moment when Macintosh embarrasses Page for Davis’s benefit. The episode ends positive but it’s a heck of a trip getting there.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s03e04 – Blood & Money

“Miss Fisher’s,” as a rule, doesn’t do children in danger episodes. There’s been at least one other one, maybe another (but I don’t think really think so), but this episode opens with a kid buried in a shallow grave. It’s very intense right off.

Though it’s also got some post-war things to work through and they’re not as intense as usual so it sort of evens out.

Essie Davis’s client this episode–though Dr. Mac (Tammy Macintosh) is also going to have need of her)—is young Jarin Towney. He and his brother live on the very mean streets of Collingwood, where they hear of heroic Miss Fisher and her golden revolver. It’s pretty awesome to hear about the lore; Davis is a real-life (non-powered) superhero, she should have a fan club.

Towney’s aforementioned brother is missing; will Davis take the case and find him? Pretty soon, Macintosh is calling with some bad news—that dead boy in the shallow grave from the cold open? They find him near her hospital.

And it turns out there are three boys missing in total, so even if it’s not Towney’s brother, there’s still something very unpleasant going on.

The prime suspects are a nurse (Diana Glenn) and a severely disfigured war veteran (James O'Connell), who Davis and Ashleigh Cummings espy being up to strange shenanigans but maybe not illicit ones. Macintosh and her boss, Dan Spielman, are trying to get a donation to the hospital to fund a veteran rehabilitation program and the dead kids thing is really not helping. So Davis is doubly on the case.

And not just because she’s the Collingwood girl made (quite) good.

It’s a good mystery, with some excellent twists, and a decent enough finish. Besides the danger to the kids, there’s also the surprising unpleasantness of Hugo Johnstone-Burt’s subplot. He’s been cast out of home because of his conversion to Catholicism (for Cummings) and he’s keeping that situation secret from her. It’s the darkest Johnstone-Burt’s ever had to go and it’s rather affecting.

No drama for Nathan Page and Davis this episode, just the comfortable flirting—though there is a touch of some significant, which Cummings interrupts. It’s a good episode; Towney and Davis are excellent together.

When you think about it, it’s kind of a surprise she hasn’t assembled The Esplanade Peculiars yet. She does live at 221B, after all.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s03e03 – Murder & Mozzarella

So I thought this episode was one of those pre-1980s Mafia stories where they never referred to the Mafia by name because they call it the Camorra here but the Camorra is actually a different Italian criminal organization. The more you know.

Miss Fisher (Essie Davis) and Inspector Jack (Nathan Page)—or should I say, Inspector Johnny—versus the mob was not an episode of “Miss Fisher’s” I was expecting. But I also wasn’t expecting Page to have another chaste love interest… you get the impression he spends most nights drinking with Davis.

But no. He’s off at an Italian restaurant making eyes at comely widow Louisa Mignone, who’s making just as many eyes back. We finally get to see Davis jealous. And Page reveling in it; well, at least as much as Page would revel in it. Until things get serious with Mignone, whose restaurant is part of a feud.

Mignone’s father-in-law Vince D'Amico is both chef and mob boss and he says the other Italian restaurant has been stealing their recipes. Given the other restaurant’s chef, Annette Serene, is super-mean, it seems possible. In fact, D’Amico and his family are sure Serene’s family had D’Amico’s son (and Mignone’s husband) killed. Because they take cooking very seriously.

There’s also kids Danielle Horvat and Paul Pantano—then Robert Mammone, who’s Horvat’s father and Serene’s son-in-law—he’s also a widower—plus enforcer Alex Andreas.

It’s a very full episode, which director Peter Andrikidis maneuvers quite well. Especially since there’s also the big subplot about Ashleigh Cummings finally convincing Hugo Johnstone-Burt to convert to Catholicism and it turns out he’s all for it once he discovers Cummings has to do whatever he says because he’s the husband. Cummings, on the other hand, thinks maybe the Church has got that one wrong.

Really good performance this episode from Page—the closest he’s had to a showcase maybe ever—and the finale’s excellent.