Liar’s bloody twist – and how victims pay the price for justice
ITS twists and turns kept five million viewers captivated. As ITV announces a second series of Liar – focusing on who killed Andrew Earlham – CHRISTOPHER STEVENS gives his verdict on last night’s gripping finale:
Never trust a man who calls his teenage son ‘mate’. It’s the mark of a manipulator. Simon (Bertie Carvel) couldn’t help doing it in Doctor Foster, even when his son pleaded with him to stop.
and in the finale of Liar (ITv), serial rapist andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd) did it repeatedly as he attempted to wheedle his way out of trouble. ‘You believe me, don’t you, mate?’… ‘ Say you were with me that night, mate’… ‘To be honest with you, mate, I’m really scared’…
The drama ended with Earlham sprawling dead in a ditch on the Tollesbury estuary. His throat had been cut. Shot from above by a camera drone, the Essex waterways create a complex pathway of islands as the tide rises. The pattern looks like the neural network of a human brain, an image the show has exploited from the start.
Each week we’ve watched from the skies as Earlham’s victim Laura (Joanne Froggatt) obsessively explored these inlets in a canoe. It seemed as though she was trapped inside her own mind and searching for sanity – an apt visual metaphor that described her exhausted mental state throughout the drama.
Now Earlham’s body lay there, apparently pinned in a corner of Laura’s brain.
That’S fitting too: She has defeated him, but we know she will never be able to eradicate the memory of his abuse.
Liar had a bleak message for victims of rape. Though police took Laura’s complaint seriously, they were powerless to help. Even when Earlham attacked the detective in charge of the case, in her own home, they could not act on suspicions alone.
The one copper who turned maverick and attempted to procure evidence by illegal means lost his job. Even when the CID department attempted to ensnare Earlham on a fake date, he saw through the ruse.
In the end it was Laura’s all-con- suming mania that beat him. She relentlessly examined every word he’d ever said to her, and devised one plan after another to stop him. But that came at a terrible cost. ‘It wastes you,’ she confessed. ‘It eats away at you, and every time I feel that way, it’s like it’s happening all over again.’
The camera watched her constantly as though it was spying – from the corner of a dark alley, or peeping around the bonnet of a vehicle in an underground car park. It felt that Laura was constantly being watched, which added to the pervading sense of paranoia.
The script, by brothers Jack and Harry Williams, did not shy away from the dark reality that Earlham was able to carry on committing his sex crimes because other women did not speak out.
Earlham’s mother-in-law refused to believe ill of him, despite her own daughter’s suicide. The dead woman’s best friend could not bring herself to report the fact Earlham had also drugged and raped her – in fact, she blamed herself for not fighting him off. The surgeon was only able to avoid arrest because he was forewarned by Mia (Ivana Basic), his mother’s carer. What hold did Earlham have over Mia? Was she one of his victims too?
The drama has been bitterly welltimed, reaching its conclusion in the week that sexual predator Har- vey Weinstein’s abuses have finally come to light. Just like Earlham, it appears the Hollywood producer was able to keep preying on women partly because some of his victims deliberately shielded him.
Others tried to speak out and were crushed. Yesterday the Mail revealed that one of them was Ioan Gruffudd’s own wife, the actress alice Evans. She rebuffed his leery advances outside a hotel bathroom, and his last words were: ‘Let’s hope it all works out for your boyfriend.’
Despite starring roles in blockbuster movies such as Fantastic Four, Gruffudd’s career has been curiously stop- start since then. Neither he nor his wife has ever been cast in a Weinstein film. On the strength of his performance in Liar, the lack of roles has nothing to do with a lack of talent. Gruffudd was especially good as he pretended to cry in front of his son. at that moment, we knew Earlham cared for nobody but himself, despite his carefully crafted reputation as a devoted dad.
Even though the central character is dead, the Williams brothers are working on a sequel. It will be looking at who was responsible for Earlham’s death.
How that will play out is anyone’s guess. But one thing is certain: It promises to be dark, convoluted and gripping… just like the first series.