Broadchurch's dumb ending

Jessy Randall

SPOILERS

SPOILER ALERT

IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED THE LAST EPISODE OF BROADCHURCH, YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T READ THIS

Broadchurch started off with such promise. A small town full of suspects in a young boy's murder. Many people with secrets to hide. Sinister surprises at every turn. We knew this because the camera kept zooming in on suspicious things, and DUN-DUN-DUN type music played to show us that characters were up to no good.

The whole fun of mysteries is figuring out who's guilty, usually one step ahead or one step behind the detective(s) on the job. We have to trust the mystery to trick us a little, give us unexpected twists. But a mystery can't be STUPID. It can't trick us so much that we no longer trust the mystery itself. And that's what happened with Broadchurch.

David Tennant's seasoned detective keeps telling his partner (played by the excellent Olivia Colman) that she's too trusting. We know she's going to be upset to find out that anyone in her town could commit murder. We know she's going to learn her lesson, but good, by the end. And that we too should distrust everybody.

But the show does us a disservice when it pounds this lesson home to Ellie. At one point, she self-righteously claims that no woman could be unaware her husband was abusing their child. We're all in her shoes at that moment in the show: we, too, distrust the woman she distrusts, and for good reasons (the DUN-DUN-DUN music, etc.).

We're, therefore, meant to be as shocked as Ellie is to learn that Ellie's husband is the murderer. The lesson for the viewer is supposed to be that we can't ever really know anyone, that we shouldn't trust our own best beloveds.

Thanks, Broadchurch, but the lesson I took away is that I should never have trusted the writers of this show. You can't play scary music and zoom in on every tiny hand gesture and manipulate your audience like that and then expect us to nod and smile when we take our punishment for believing what you were telling us.

In other words, this would have been a better ending:

Comments

[Patti Abbott]

I guess I kind of disagree. Not every "mystery" has to focus solely on fooling its viewers as to whodunnit. I thought this was a nice examination of life in an isolated community, how its citizens knew and didn't know each other, how the things we think we know are not always true, how people deal with grief, how a newcomer integrates himself into their lives, how prejudice can drive a man to death. I liked it. I am always disappointed when interviewing people and merely pointing how the perpetrator is the sole aim of a show and too many Masterpiece Mysteries do just that. This was different.

[Jessy Randall]

Hi Patti! I agree with you that Broadchurch was a terrific story about small town relationships. If it had been billed as a drama, rather than a mystery, and if we hadn't had all the DUN DUN DUN music and close-ups on non-clues, I would have felt quite different about it.

[Lynne Patrick]

I saw somewhere that they were recording one episode at a time and writing it as they went along. I wondered at the time, and still do, if they simply ran out of suspects and were left with only one person who hadn't already been cleared.
What worries me more is that there's going to be a second series! How, for goodness sake? It won't work without David Tennant and Olivia Colman, and finding a way back for them would stretch credibility way beyond breaking point.

[Jessy Randall]

I AGREE! When I read this interview with the show's creators, http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/09/25/broadchurch-killer-finale/, I was irked to discover that the actors were kept in the dark until the last possible moment. The actress who played the mother of the murdered boy was worried she might be the killer! Clearly, the show wanted a huge GOTCHA moment with the audience. A cheap trick, if you ask me.