The Cry finale: a plausible horror show of deception
There can’t be a parent who hasn’t suffered a shudder of recognition over the course of watching The Cry (BBC One, Sunday). Paranoia over keeping a baby safe. Outsiders interfering when you need them least, absent when you need them most. Shameful certainty that you are failing, more or less all the time. And, ugh, the sleep deprivation.
Unlike last year’s The Replacement, whose gripping interrogation of the insecurities of new motherhood ultimately descended into farce, the BBC’S Helen Fitzgerald adaptation stuck the landing, its climax the heightened but still comprehensible consequence of a relationship poisoned beyond repair by a dreadful error and a terrible lie, maintained with growing desperation. The juggling of timelines, initially so irritating, paid off in a cavalcade of grim revelations.
Long numbed and buffeted by grief, Joanna (Jenna Coleman) finally snapped, killing her partner Alastair (Ewen Leslie) after forcing him to admit his part in the death of their baby, Noah. When confronted, he finally, tearfully revealed that he, not Joanna, had made the fatal mistake by giving Noah the wrong medicine at the airport. Everything that followed reflected his refusal to accept responsibility. Whether it was signing up for a book exploiting their cover story of child abduction, fronting a charity for parents of children who had suffered violent deaths or urging Joanna to have another baby, it was a horror show of thoughtlessness, gall and deception.
Even at the moment of confession, Alastair’s inveterate wheedling led him to inadvertently spill another transgression – that he had lied about where he had buried Noah. Truly, Leslie’s shifty, troubled performance created a villain for the #Metoo age, controlling, self-absorbed and weirdly boastful to the last; yet also a weak, wounded man whose flaws appeared rooted in identifiable trauma. “You have such heart, and it appears so genuine,” mused Alastair’s bumptious new publicist of Joanna. “You’re Alastair’s greatest asset.”
Or his worst enemy. Joanna’s courtroom confession was a quietly devastating tour de force from Coleman – no fireworks, just the relief of telling, if not the truth, then a truth which might just prove enough to get her back on her feet. ITV’S Victoria cemented her star quality, but The Cry has allowed Coleman to show her full range, to haunting effect. It made a welcome antidote to the flash-bang thrills of Bodyguard which preceded it on Sunday nights – its psychological dramas just as compelling and a darn sight more plausible.
The road to Sheffield is paved with good intentions. Having conquered Planet Desolation last week, the Time Lord (Jodie Whittaker) and companions pitched up in 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, the heart of segregation in the Deep South. When Ryan’s (Tosin Cole) efforts to help out a local white woman met with a violent response, in stepped one Rosa Parks (Vinette Robinson, dignified forbearance and resilience personified).
When allowed to riff on history rather than be confined by it, Doctor
Who (BBC One, Sunday) can be a ludicrous romp (Let’s Kill Hitler) or deeply poignant (Vincent and the Doctor). Barring a couple of good gags about Elvis and Banksy, however, Chris Chibnall and Malorie Blackman’s episode felt overawed by the history it was depicting, short-changing some imaginative direction from Mark Tonderai and bearing a score weighed down by French horns straight from the gloopier end of The West Wing.
It didn’t help that the villain was insubstantial in the extreme: an intergalactic mass murderer and white supremacist by the name of Krasko (Joshua Bowman), released from prison with his violent tendencies neutered by technology. Undeterred, Krasko instead resolved to exercise his repugnant philosophy through small, inconsequential actions, nudging history in a different direction. Could the Doctor and co ensure the bus boycott took place as planned, lighting the flame of the civil rights movement? Well, obviously. This was, in short, Quantum Leap in reverse, where rather than changing history for the better, the heroes were attempting to stop history being changed for the worse.
Rosa Parks was a deeply significant, inspiring figure and clearly it’s important that children should know about her, but this felt didactic and stodgy, lacking the fizz and fun of both classic Who and Blackman’s lively children’s novels. The latter routinely tackle serious issues with a light touch. Here, I couldn’t quibble with the sentiment, just the execution.