Not happy in ‘Happy Valley’ (Season 3, BBC)
The last ten minutes of the final episode of this three-series, 18-episode BBC drama is what passes for retribution for all the unhappiness that has preceded it. Like many police dramas, Happy Valley is underpinned by a quest for justice.
In the penultimate scene, after packing up her desk and vanishing before her retirement-party even starts, police sergeant Catherine Cawood leaves. Just minutes before, Tommy Lee Royce – who had raped Catherine’s daughter Becky’s and had fathered of Becky’s child – had enacted self-immolation in Catherine’s kitchen the morning of Catherine’s retirement. Becky committed suicide in Series 1. Earlier in Series 3, Royce had escaped from prison.
In the final scene – that afternoon, the next day? – and out of uniform, she visits the grave of her daughter. Catherine places a finger-kiss on the top of the gravestone, and the camera swings to a new position – face onto the stone – showing in full the inscription. We have seen the stone before, but not from this angle. “Rebecca Cawoon, (Becky)’” it says. Birth and death years, Daughter of … Sister of, and then this inscription: “In God is My Hope.”
Calling this saga a “fiction of ideas” is not straightforward, but the elements are there. Royce has been labeled throughout as a psychopath, not the personification of “evil” per se, but near enough. The final series offers a glimpse or who that he might be seeking redemption, but there are few if any characters that enact virtue as the counterpart to his viciousness. The “valley” is anything but “happy.”
Catherine’s mobile phone buzzes. A text message notes the TLR – Royce – has been declared dead from his self-inflicted injuries. Catherine might have killed him but didn’t, or just let him burn to death in the kitchen. Waiting is part of the justice she has come to represent, though she is far from a saint.
And yet: “God” and “Hope” are near-enough the closing words. Are these merely irony? Or does that inscription tell us – the hopeful among us at least – that there is a God, or even that there is hope? What does “hope” entail? Hope seems to be, even in a God-less fictional world like this, an aspiration for a route out, for progress perhaps. Hope is at least a way of coping with the existential angst of the story, through all its twists.