Deadwater Fell
“Episode 4”, Season 1 Episode 4
Requested By
Kerr on Discord
What do I know about this series going into it?
Never heard of it. The blurbs and pictures going into it tell me there’s a village, a fire, somebody being let out on bail, and David Tennant.
Previously On
A woman tells another woman she doesn’t like when “he” speaks to her like that. Kate made a call to Carol, but Carol hung up. Kate “lost it” because Tennant spoke about Simon. Tom (Tennant) is accused of killing someone, but it was actually Steve who killed them. A woman is four months pregnant. Steve is a police officer. Somebody wants to change his statement but Steve won’t let him. Steve resigns from the police. Tom is released. Somebody is on a cliff contemplating suicide.
Recap
Tom gets ready in the morning, but leaves his wedding ring on the dresser. His wife, hanging up clothes outside, finds blood in her pocket; in a pregnancy test she takes in the bathroom I discover she is neither pregnant nor Tom’s wife.
Tom enters his kitchen to find two women preparing for a fundraiser for a gazebo (what?). One of the women, Nicky, is I think his lawyer, who tells him he has a court date. He doesn’t understand: wasn’t the witness tampering enough to throw out the case against him? He insists he’s not guilty, but they both seem to be mildly scared of him.
The episode plays this as “poor guy, he is still suffering from the reputational harm done to him by the false accusation” but I suspect it will turn out he is guilty.
Elsewhere, Not-Tom’s-wife is sitting at the kitchen table with her actual husband, Steve, and their two kids, Elliot and Luke.
Going about his day, Tom tries to have friendly conversation with a neighbor, but she too is clearly scared of him and extricates herself quickly. His day involves signing a document relating to his bail conditions: a curfew, no driving, no talking to the witnesses.
Later, he sits on a park bench, with Lewis1 staring at him from across the street until not-Tom’s-wife takes him away. She’s clearly scared of him too. When not-Tom’s-wife (I think her name is Jess, but it’s not clear) tells Steve about this, he is angry and borderline-violent. Steve doesn’t want Tom going anywhere near “the kids”.
The plot here is still very unclear, but the next conversation between Steve and maybe-Jess helps a lot. Lewis apparently saw something or was the victim of something, which may or may not be what Tom is accused of doing. And “after the accident”, whatever that means, “Kate” told Steve that Tom made her take “these tablets” and was sure that Tom would kill her one day. So at least now I know who the victim is, and that despite his witness tampering Steve is still certain that Tom did it, as is everyone else.
Tom wants to pay for the gazebo in its entirety, but his mother(?) knows he’s already in debt and tells him to stop lying. She’s talking about more than the money, so even she thinks he’s guilty.
Tom enters the gazebo fundraiser2, and everyone is avoiding looking at him3. Steve arrives and physically attacks Tom on sight. He’s held back by the townspeople, but shouts at Tom to stay away from his kids. Tom is fed up: “You think you know everything, but you don’t! He got a witness to lie! They were my family!”
Okay, so I think Elliot and Luke are Tom’s kids, and after Kate died they were given to Steve and Jess as foster care. But this doesn’t make much sense; Steve was a police officer investigating the crime, and resigned for organizing false testimony against Tom. Wouldn’t the authorities put the kids with literally anybody else?
Back home, Tom tells Nicky, his lawyer, that he wants a restraining order against Steve, but Nicky points out that he shouldn’t call attention to the way he yelled in front of everybody in the village and violate his bail conditions. Tom fires her.
Still at the fundraiser, another couple named “Luke”4 and “Sandra” ask Jess if maybe they should take the kids for a while. Tom’s outburst maybe started to convince them, maybe Tom is innocent, maybe Steve is a problem? Jess gets up and leaves in disgust.
Later, Tom is once again violating his bail conditions, having driven over to Jess’s house. Banging on the door, he sounds hysterical and threatening, but claims he just wants to tell someone about what happened at the end.
Jess lets him in, completely neglecting to hold onto a carving knife just in case. He rambles until she drags him back into focus. He tells her about his own abusive father and how his mother let it happen and did nothing. He says that if he had seen Kate abusing his daughters he would have…. Then he abruptly gets up and leaves.
Jess desperately calls Steve over and over again, and eventually finds him in a bar, piss drunk. Steve sobs that he “let them down”.
I’m completely lost. I now know that Tom’s kids are not Luke and Elliot, because he had daughters. So where are they, are they dead too? What is Tom’s relationship to Jess and to Luke? Why is Tom violating his bail so blatantly? Who actually killed Kate, and why did Steve hate Tom so much to try to frame him for it? Who did Steve let down, his kids or Tom’s?
Steve and Jess’s conversation continues at home, and I get some answers: Steve responded to the fire in Tom’s house5, which killed Tom’s daughters and I assume Tom’s wife Kate. They were already dead before he arrived, but he still felt responsible. And Jess at some point slept with “him” (probably Tom), which she says was because she was lonely.
Jess asks Steve: do you want to have another kid? Not because I do – do you yourself want another kid? Luke and Elliot are Steve’s kids from a previous marriage, and though she wants a child of her own, she wants to stop trying until their relationship is repaired.
Meanwhile, Tom picks up a form that will enable him to collect his mother’s pension for her, because she’s growing too frail to do it herself. At least from what I’ve seen of his mother, this seems to be a lie.
Jess shows up at Tom’s house. He isn’t home, but she chats with his mother, Carol. Jess asks about Tom’s father’s abuse, but she doesn’t understand: he was the kindest man, why would Tom lie and claim he was abusive? With impeccable timing, that’s when Tom arrives, so now Jess is certain: everything, all the stories of Kate abusing the kids, the sob story he told her, were lies. He murdered his wife and kids. From Jess’s passion confronting him, I now think Kate must have been her sister, which explains the relationships here a lot more.
Tom demands Carol call the police, but she just leaves, gets in Jess’s car, and they go to the police station.
In a series of flashbacks, we then see what actually happened the night of the fire. Tom is listening to his wife’s voicemail messages6, and discovers that Kate is planning to divorce him. He confronts her: You’re cheating on me with Simon and planning to divorce me. Their daughter Emily hears them arguing and flees the house; Kate (who is white, and therefore probably not Jess’s sister as I thought earlier) runs after her to bring her back.
That night, he murders both his daughters by injecting them with something. Then he waits patiently for Kate to discover they’re dead, before grabbing her arm and injecting her as well.
He then sits alone for some time before calling his mother from Kate’s phone. “I tried my best,” he says, then hangs up and pulls out another needle to inject himself. But we then, confusingly, cut to him sitting in a room alone and waiting for the fire he set in the house to claim him. Much later, he wakes up in the hospital.
End of flashback. The police arrive, and place Tom under arrest.
Unresolved questions
Did Tom intend on killing himself at all? If so, was it through injection or through fire? Why did he set up two methods of suicide? Did he try injection, chicken out, then try fire but unexpectedly get rescued? What was the point of all that?
What was Tom planning to do with that pension form? Is his mother really too frail to pick up her pension, despite all appearances? Or was he planning on murdering her too?
What will happen with Jess and Steve’s relationship? What will happen with Luke’s mental state?
Who will represent Tom in court?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 4/10. A typical plot for a television episode, with a couple of issues that prevent it from getting an average score of 5.
The biggest problem is the unresolved question of what Tom intended all along. Did he want to kill himself by injection, kill himself by fire, or set it up so he could be rescued at the last minute? The episode is very wishy-washy on this point.7 On the one hand, there are several signs that he never intended to survive: his phone call to his mother, his reaction upon waking up, and the fact that his first attempt at suicide involved the same chemical he used to kill his family. On the other hand, the whole subplot with the padlock (where he claimed repeatedly that Kate was abusing his daughters by locking them in their room, and then we discover that he ordered the padlock himself the day of the fire) implies that he prepared in advance an alibi for why he murdered Kate. But if he prepared such an alibi, how was he going to explain why he murdered the girls too? How was he going to explain away the fire?
It's possible to answer these questions by just saying “Tom was stupid”, but that’s not really an answer. I suspect that the answer actually is “the writers wanted to add elements to the mystery but didn’t think it through”.
Writing: 3/10. It is really unclear what story the writers were trying to tell.
There was a theme throughout the episode: the fallout from the accusation. Everybody in the village is scared of Tom. He has to deal with his bail conditions, his court dates, the suspicious reactions of his neighbors. All of that, thanks to one person bearing false witness against him!
The episode explores this just enough to make you want to feel sorry for him – and then tells you, never mind, they were 100% right to be wary. The guy who was falsely accused turned out to be guilty after all.
So what’s the message I should take away from the episode? Prejudice is good? Go with what everybody is thinking? “Innocent until proven guilty” is a sham?8
Production: 5/10. Production values typical for television. I wasn’t a fan of the heavy use of blur, and I didn’t really get all those scenes of Luke coloring. Tennant is a good actor, as we saw in Inside Man a few weeks ago, but he’s just not given much to work with here, nor is anybody else.
Characterization: 2/10. Steve and Tom are violent men. That’s about the entirety of characterization here. I don’t know anything about anybody else, not even Jess, who probably had the second-most amount of screentime.
Accessibility: 5/10. The Accessibility rating measures the presumed difference between what I am able to understand and what a viewer who watched the whole series is able to understand. So despite the fact that so much of Tom’s behavior is left unexplained, at the close of the episode I believe I understood as much about them as the writers intended. It just took a while to get there, and I spent the first two-thirds of the episode pursuing several incorrect theories of what was going on.
I still don’t understand why Luke in particular was so badly traumatized – what he knows or didn’t know about what happened the night of the fire – or why Steve hated Tom so much.
Closure: 4/10. The writers left almost every subplot dangling: Jess and Steve’s relationship; Luke’s mental state; the thing with Carol’s pension. And the main plot was resolved only in the most technical sense: we know who committed the murders and the basic outline of why. But the actual steps Tom took on the night of the fire make no sense, and we simply don’t know what he was trying to accomplish.
Do I want to watch the series now?
No. This finale pales in comparison to that of Inside Man, which was better written, had more fleshed-out characters, a better plot, and a more coherent theme to explore.
I didn’t even notice until editing this post that I kept switching between calling him Luke and calling him Lewis. I still don’t know which it is, or how I got confused.
It’s at a local school, which explains a lot. I couldn’t understand why his mother was holding a town-wide fundraiser for her own private gazebo. But how did Tom expect to pay for the entire thing himself?
At least I think so. There are moments I think it’s real, and there are moments when I think the director’s trying to communicate that he’s imagining it.
Maybe the kid really is Lewis. I apologize for making fun of the British Empire.
Wasn’t Steve a cop? Maybe he was a generalized first responder.
How and why? Why didn’t she make more effort to hide it from him, especially if she feared his violent nature?
Normally this would fall the category of Accessibility, not Story. My assumption is always that if I don’t understand something that appeared in previous episodes, it’s my fault for not watching them. But in this case the flashback scenes are presented as a big reveal of the fact that Tom was the murderer all along, so clearly none of this was previously explained.
There’s another potential error that I want to comment on.
The Previously mentioned that a woman was four months pregnant, but I don’t know who it was (Previouslies are always rapid-fire and I don’t know the characters yet). And it is clear from the opening scenes that Jess has a miscarriage; she discovers she is bleeding, then takes a pregnancy test that turns out negative.
At four months of pregnancy, the baby is already several inches long. If it emerged with the bleeding, Jess would not have been in doubt as to whether or not she was still pregnant. If it did not - and even if it did! - she needed to go to the emergency room immediately, not sit around in her house taking a pregnancy test. Bleeding at that stage of pregnancy is a serious matter! At that point in pregnancy, the placenta is developed enough that an ultrasound is required to ensure that during the miscarriage it fully detached from the wall of the uterus and emerged. Otherwise she risks continuous bleeding, necrosis, and other serious health issues.
Besides which, the pregnancy test should still have read positive. hCG, the hormone detected by pregnancy tests, is still present in enormous quantities for days or weeks, depending on the miscarriage. There was no way it dropped to zero less than an hour after the first appearance of blood.
I am not including this error in the body of the post, nor does the rating take it into account, because I am not sure the four-months-pregnant woman was Jess.
This isn’t the most coherent or well-written (at least as far as what made it to screen) miniseries, although an earlier instance of Tennant and Cush Jumbo working together before their recent collaboration as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. I feel like you would got it well enough in the end.