Doctor Foster’s back ...and simmering like a forgotten kettle
DOCTOR FOSTER BBC1, last night ★★★★✩
SoMeone sent her a bouquet of flowers accompanied by a card with the one word ‘bitch’ – ouch, ouch, ouch. In a moment of difficulty, she drank wine alone in her kitchen, straight from the bottle – glug, glug, glug.
She gate-crashed her ex-husband’s wedding party and cried when her teenage son moved out. Things got so stressy at one point that she went into the garden to dissolve her wedding ring in a gallon of sulphuric acid – fizz, fizz, fizz.
And apart from that, Doctor Foster, how did you enjoy your trip to Parminster?
Last night, Suranne Jones returned as the melodramatic medic in BBC1’s second series of this unexpected hit. It wasn’t long before she was simmering like a forgotten kettle, exuding the kind of rage that suggested she was packing husband-hating, heat-seeking missiles in her voluminous bra.
‘Anyone could be lying to me, and I wouldn’t know,’ she seethed. Ain’t that the truth, doc.
Two years ago, ten million viewers tuned in to watch the dinner party from hell dénouement in the first series, as Gemma Foster finally confronted her husband Simon (Bertie Carvel) over his affair with their friends’ 23-year-old daughter Kate (Jodie Comer).
In the final scenes, Slimy Simon and his pregnant mistress moved to London, leaving Gemma to pick up the pieces of her life. And initially, she seemed to be doing just fine.
The new series reveals that Gemma is now head of Parminster Medical Practice – unlikely, given her breaches of medical ethics in the past, but let’s not nitpick. Her nice, supportive friends are urging her onto dating websites and she appears to have a warm relationship with her teenage son, Tom.
After bearing the indignity of infidelity and abandonment, brave Gemma is healing. She has applied a cold compress onto her cuckquean’s fury and neatly stitched up her marital wounds – but it is all a façade.
WHen Simon and Kate get married and move back to Parminster, everything changes. And what ignites Gemma’s fury all over again is that they have not suffered in the way that she has suffered. Her life has been ruined, while he has remarried and become suspiciously wealthy. This further arouses her suspicions that he cheated her out of money during the divorce.
Before the happy couple move in, Gemma sneaks around their new £1million house, making little gasps at the swimming pool, the sumptuous kitchen, the unfurling, relentless luxury. Her cheap heels clatter across the white oak floors, her expression magnificently ripples from bitterness to envy, via a dark pool of quiet wrath.
But when confronted by Simon during this illicit prowl, she seems to shrivel under his gloating gaze; suddenly dowdy of blouse and petty of intent, with her hair scraped back into a sexless, ponytail of despair.
‘I am not being patronising, but leave me behind,’ he smirks, before adding: ‘How old is that top?’ enraging! Simon is as fabulously horrible as ever, while Gemma negotiates her trapeze wire of sanity with increasingly wobbly steps in this heart-clutcher of an opening episode. What is so winning about Doctor Foster is that both husband and wife are morally ambiguous and borderline villainous. Like many divorcing couples, they both want to punish each other. Badly. Meanwhile, the way they both weaponise their poor son is shameful, although neither can see it through their haze of righteousness. Writer Mike Bartlett has done a terrific job exploring the blasted heath of the postdivorce landscape; a place where friends must choose where their loyalties lie and casual affronts can take on the significance of hammer-blows.
Yet at the centre of this drama is the quiet, sad, dichotomy between the one who leaves, and the one who is left behind, between the loved one and the one who loves.
This is the story of a life that unravelled and a family that became undone when a wife found a stray blonde hair on her husband’s jacket. Two years later, Gemma Foster’s withering cannot age her, in fact, it seems to revive her – we can practically see the blood coursing back though her miserable atrophied veins. And while I don’t know whose side I am on, Doctor Foster’s rage is still a magnificent thing to behold.