Requested By
Kerr on Discord
What do I know about this series going into it?
Never heard of it.
Unfortunately, with several shows titled “Inside Man”, I couldn’t help but glimpse a few facts while trying to figure out which was the one that Kerr requested. So I know it’s a mystery-drama miniseries that involves somebody on Death Row and somebody else locked in a basement.
Recap
Grieff1, an American, is in a jail cell, talking on the phone to a British police officer named Beth. He starts all philosophical about things people do and do not notice, but eventually tells Beth that he knows where “Janice Fife” is; I assume this is the missing person locked in the basement. But he won’t tell her directly. After the call, Beth and her partner (who is driving) discuss how frustrating Grieff is.
During the call, a helicopter arrives at the prison, delivering a visitor named Gordon. Gordon will be returning to England before Grieff is executed, which means this prison is in the US. But Grieff wants to “make a deal” with him before he goes. Turns out Grieff is in prison for beheading Gordon’s daughter, and he’ll tell him where the head is buried if he prevents the execution. Gordon protests that he doesn’t have that kind of power, but Grieff says that a “powerful criminal” like him has a lot of connections.
Gordon turns the deal down, but Grieff continues to provoke him until he starts beating the crap out of the prisoner. Grieff is certain the guards will step in to stop it, but the probably-warden monitoring the conversation orders the guards to stand by and let it happen.
Opening credits.
David Tennant is at home, looking resolved and determined and ignoring the long series of SMSs being sent to his phone. In his basement is a resigned blood-covered woman, and a teenager banging on the door shouting “Dad”.
Flashback to when Tennant, a vicar, is looking for a maths tutor for his son, Ben. The flashbacks jump forward through the initial interview to hire the tutor, the growing friendship between the two, the way it affects the family’s scheduling and use of the rooms in the house (for some reason); somewhere in the middle of this, captions identify the tutor as Janice. So I assume this is Janice Fife, and possibly the woman in the basement. One interesting point: she reacts forcefully and almost angrily when Ben asks if she is married.
Return to the present, and I now recognize the woman in the basement as Janice. “My dad would never-” Ben begins to say, but Janice interrupts him and tells him to look at the evidence in front of his eyes.
Tennant is still ignoring dozens of SMSs, which identify his character as Harry and the sender as Mary. He searches the Internet for information on how long carbon monoxide poisoning takes to set in.
Back in America, the warden comes down to Grieff’s cell. Turns out Grieff gave in very quickly during the beatdown and told Gordon where his daughter’s head is. “Why didn’t you intervene?” asks Grieff. The warden, identified in captions as Casey, doesn’t really answer.
Back in the UK, Beth and her partner break into a house (Janice’s?). Turns out they aren’t police officers; they work for Grieff in some capacity, and are looking for her.
Meanwhile, in the basement, there’s a sudden ping from Ben’s pocket. He’s had his phone the whole time! Why hasn’t he called the police? “My battery is low,” is his excuse for not mentioning his phone to Janice. And he doesn’t want to call the police, because he doesn’t want to get his father in trouble. Instead he wants to call his father directly. The man who locked him in the basement and is ignoring his cries for help? Denial can make someone incredibly delusional…
Casey wants to use the tape of the assault to blackmail Gordon. He’ll turn over the tape to the FBI. Gordon confidently asserts that nobody will care if he beat up his daughter’s murderer, but Casey points out that the FBI has been desperate to get Gordon into a courtroom for years. “How do you think that will go for you?” he asks.2 So Casey, who apparently wants to save Grieff too, makes a deal: if Grieff was telling the truth, help get his execution canceled, and I’ll destroy the tape.
Harry’s wife calls him. She’s suspicious of him – she wants to know how Janice “sent the email”. You know, the email that explains that her phone is broken and that she’s gone hiking? If her phone is broken she didn’t send it from her phone, and if she went hiking she didn’t take her laptop with her.3 She points out that Janice’s laptop is still in their house, which is when I realize: she’s not suspiciously probing a hole in his story, she’s in on it and they need to figure it out how to seal it.
In the basement, Ben is still trying to understand. Why did Harry lock them in here? Why does he constantly say he wants to protect Ben and his mother? They keep mentioning pornography, so I think Janice must have accidentally discovered Harry had a stash of child pornography. But if so I don’t see why Ben is locked in the basement.
That’s when Harry calls. Ben of course doesn’t answer, which is what Harry is counting on: he leaves an alibi-establishing voicemail asking Ben where he is, are you at Lucy’s, give me a call when you can.
Mary returns home and collects Janice’s laptop and other things. The plan is to dump them somewhere they’ll be found easily, so police attention is drawn away from their house when she is discovered to be missing. And aha, here’s the explanation: They’re murdering Janice because she found child pornography on Ben’s computer, and they’re trying to save Ben.
But something still doesn’t add up. If it was Ben’s porn, Janice is lying to Ben in all her promises that nothing bad will happen to him if he sets her free. Could it be Harry’s? But he seems to sincerely believe that Ben is the one in danger. Maybe it is Harry’s and Janice mistook it for Ben’s? But surely he’d just take the fall for Ben in that case. Could it be Mary’s? That would be unusual (though not impossible), and it would require both Harry and Janice to think it belonged to Ben, with Mary lying to Harry about it. I can see that, but it doesn’t explain why Harry is killing Janice and Ben in order to save Ben.
Ben listens to the voicemail. “He just wants to know where I am,” he says sincerely. Wait, so Ben thinks Harry doesn’t know he’s in the basement? But Harry clearly does know.
Ben finally does call his father to ask what’s going on. He pretends not to know anything, especially when Harry lies and says that Janice went home. So maybe Harry doesn’t know Ben is trapped in the basement with her. But how does he not hear him banging on the door?
Meanwhile, Beth calls Grieff from Janice’s apartment; the woman she works with is named Morag. Beth, a journalist, asks what she’s doing breaking into a random person’s apartment, through which Grieff proves she lied about being Janice’s friend. Meanwhile Mary uses Janice’s keys to get in – and both she and Beth are surprised to see each other. Mary claims to be Janice’s friend; Beth claims to be Janice’s flatmate. They both know the other doesn’t know they’re not supposed to be there, and trying to bluff each other out.
But then Mary gets a call: It’s Ben. Why is his father lying? Because Janice found porn belonging to “the creepy verger”, Edgar (who we haven’t seen at all). But why did Janice think it was Harry’s, and why is Harry always talking about protecting Ben? Ben finally reveals: he’s been hiding in the cellar this whole time. Mary desperately tells him to get out of there – Harry’s set up a carbon monoxide trap to kill Janice – but Ben’s phone finally dies. She desperately calls Harry, but he’s stopped answering.
Mary freaks out, but Beth won’t leave her alone, chasing her out into the street, at which point Mary gets hit by a bus.
Ben, under the influence of the carbon monoxide poisoning, starts screaming at Janice. She lied to him! She thought it was Ben’s porn all along and was going to turn him in to the police! (I still don’t understand how Harry can’t hear this.) And he kills Janice with a hammer.
Upstairs, the “Janice will be dead by now” timer goes off, and Harry freaks out with remorse at the last second. He rushes to open the basement door, where he finds Ben, standing over Janice dead on the ground, not knowing what he’s done. He tells Ben to get out of there; he’ll take the blame.
Morag and Beth drive to Harry’s house4. Seeing Ben run out, they split up: Beth to run in to save Janice, Morag to chase after the fleeing Ben.
Harry calls the police and starts to confess to the murder, but stops when he sees Janice take a shuddering breath and open her eyes. He has no choice: to save his son, he must finish the job. He picks up the hammer, and is tackled by Beth at the last second. They fight, and he overpowers Beth and is about to kill her when the police show up.
It’s much later. Grieff and Harry meet over video chat in prison. Their conversation is very confusing, and clearly I misunderstood a lot of what happened. Here’s the gist of it, I think:
Janice is Gordon’s daughter, and Grieff didn’t kill her. He’s on death row for a different reason. But when Janice went missing, Gordon somehow thought Grieff was responsible (even though he lives in America?). Grieff researched Janice’s disappearance, realized that the vicar never reported Janice missing, and figured out that the vicar must have been responsible. So when Gordon demanded that Grieff tell her where his daughter’s head is, he told him the truth: it’s in the basement of the vicar’s house. What he didn’t tell him is that her head was still attached to her body, and she was still alive. The people who showed up to rescue Beth from Harry were not the police, they were Gordon’s people, holding shovels and expecting to dig for a head.5
In a mid-credits scene, Janice visits Grieff in prison. She wants him to murder her husband. I thought she wasn’t married?
Unresolved questions
What, if anything, was Ben charged with?
Was Beth tracked down due to her involvement with Mary’s death?
Will Grieff be executed? Will he manage to kill Janice’s husband by then? Why does she want her husband dead?
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: 8/10. The intended theme of this episode is clear: that the divide between murderers and other human beings is very thin, and that anybody under the right circumstances can be driven to commit the most heinous of crimes out of desperation while believing they are doing the right thing.
The only problem that I have with this is the presentation. The combination of circumstances that brought Harry down this path – the number of coincidences and moving pieces that all needed to fit together in exactly the right way – was vanishingly unlikely. One answered phone6, one unanswered door, one honk of a bus horn, one flip of a switch on a space heater, and none of it ever happens. Harry is stopped before he goes all the way down that path.
The episode’s thesis may well be correct: even the saintly Harry can end up in a place where he is Not So Different from the remorseless murderer Grieff. But that ignores the fact that people start at different places on the good-evil spectrum. I haven’t seen the rest of the series and don’t know for sure, but it’s pretty clear that Harry starts off good.
Was that the case with Grieff? I don’t know, but somehow I suspect not. Somehow I suspect he required a lot less of a push than Harry did, if he required one at all.
After all, even Harry – against whom literally everything in the world conspired – did not become Grieff, not all the way. Even he still had the capacity to be shocked by the brutality and evil of Grieff’s actions. When he asks Grieff, in his innocence, “How could anybody do [the things you did]?”, we are supposed to conclude that Harry lacks self-awareness.
But that fact still works against the episode’s theme. The ideal conditions that were set up to turn Harry into a monster still didn’t turn him into Grieff. Some people really are better than others. Some people really are monsters. It’s not just the lack of a “one bad day” that makes the difference.
But let not this in-depth criticism of the theme throw you off. There’s a good reason I gave it an 8 in the Story category. The story was compelling, contained multiple moving parts that fit together well, and explored aspects of murder that are not often explored in other works. That’s more than enough to overcome the occasional plothole7 and my disagreement with the theme.
Writing: 9/10. My only criticism of the writing is that it is unsubtle. The theme of the work is stated all but explicitly. Mary and Harry indirectly congratulate their writer, where it would have been better to let the audience reach the “nobody has to pee on Columbo” conclusion on their own. Harry’s rant to Beth about how he is a good person was too over-the-top, to really drive the message home.
But with that out of the way, I was very impressed. There’s a dark humor undercurrent throughout episode. I loved the rapid-fire conversations between Ben and Janice in the flashback scenes. I loved the I’m-not-sure-I-know-you-know confrontation between Mary and Beth. And with the sole of exception of the unsubtlety at the very very end, Harry’s rapid descend into madness is expertly written.
Production: 8/10. Very little stood out in the production of the series. This high mark is mostly on the strength of the performances. Though I do want to reserve one note of praise for the graphic designers who made Harry’s internet searches look a lot more realistic than they do on most TV shows.
Characterization: 8/10. My usual metric for this sort of thing is: Am I fascinated by a character and want to know more about them? The reason I take that approach is because, of course, the characters have been around for X seasons and Y episodes, so all I’m looking for in the finale are the hints of depth that had were explored more fully over the course of the series.
But this is a miniseries, which means I’ve literally watched ¼ of the available footage for everybody involved. There aren’t many other places to explore that depth; it shows up right here.
So while it’s true that, for example, I’m fascinated by Janice and want to know more about her, I can’t say the same for Harry. With this excellent script delivered by an actor of David Tennant’s caliber, there aren’t mere hints of depth; there is actual depth. The same is true for Grieff, Gordon, and Mary. I got less of that impression from the rest of the cast.
But the scene where Harry and Mary hold hands and sob through the barred window - my god, so well done.
Accessibility: 4/10. My god, so many questions. Why did Harry refuse to let Mary into the house and only agree to pass Janice’s things through a barred window? How did Grieff get involved in this and why did he want to rescue Janice? What is Gordon’s relationship to Janice? Who the heck is Beth? What did Grieff do to end up in prison? Why does Casey support him?
While I got the gist of the main plot, there was an enormous amount I didn’t understand about how we got here and why.
Closure: 9/10. Almost everything is wrapped up in a neat little bow at the end. With the exception of learning where, for example, Ben goes from here, there isn’t much to comment on.
Do I want to watch the series now?
Yes and no. It’s excellently done, and I’m curious as to how things reached the point at the start of the episode, but I don’t want to invest the extra time.
Strange, isn’t it? If it were a full series, this would be a lock: Yes, of course I want to watch ten or twenty hours more about how these characters pinged off of each other to create this horrific scenario! But since it’s a miniseries, and it’s only 3 additional hours (I think), that’s not the case. An odd insight into my psychology, I suppose.
It’s like if you show up late to a movie theater and only see the second half of the movie: You’ll buy another ticket to see the first half. But if you only missed the first five minutes, eh, you can live without them. I feel that what I watched was complete enough that there isn’t much to be gained by seeing the rest.
Most of these names I learn from the captions.
The US uses jury trials for exactly this reason, though. It doesn’t matter how much the FBI has been gunning for you, they still have to convince twelve random citizens that you deserve to be punished for it. Gordon would never be found guilty. But then again, maybe Casey is just taking advantage of the fact that Gordon is from the UK and doesn’t know this.
Actually I do this all the time, so I can use it on the train on the way to and from the trail.
With less than an hour to go, how did she get away? Was she not forced to stay and talk to the police investigating the death, when all the bystanders clearly saw her chasing Mary into the street?
That’s a great theory and all, but after rereading my notes it’s clear it’s completely wrong:
1) Gordon’s daughter is named Rachel, not Janice. So maybe Janice is Gordon’s wife, which explains why she claimed not to have kids (her only daughter was murdered) and not to be married (he’s a major criminal, and either she didn’t want people to know or they got divorced after their daughter died).
2) The timeline doesn’t work out; Janice has been missing for less than two weeks, probably less than a day. The process that sends somebody to Death Row takes years, so there was no way Gordon could think Grieff was responsible.
So I’m left to admit that I still have no idea what Grieff had to do with anything.
Or even one unanswered phone. The one time Harry actually picks up is the one time not picking up would have prevented it all from happening.
Grieff’s only evidence for the vicar’s involvement was the fact that Harry didn’t file a missing person’s report when Janice didn’t show up for Ben’s weekly math tutoring session. I don’t know if they do things differently in the UK, but if my kid’s piano teacher doesn’t show up I don’t phone the police, I just assume something came up and try to get a hold of them the next week.