Sally Wainwright (Huddersfield, United Kingdom, 60 years old) wanted her masterpiece, the amazing Happy Valley (Movistar Plus+), an understated crime scene as raw and tragically real as it is, almost a brilliant Mike Leigh series film, to wait a little Rhys Connah turned 16 to close. Alluding to Richard Linklater and his childhood, Wainwright’s series follows in the footsteps of Sergeant Catherine Cawood – the irreplaceable Sarah Lancashire, whom Kate Winslet tried to imitate to emulate light years from the original, which was Mare of Easttown in his native Yorkshire West he said goodbye to programming in 2016 and kept his fans in suspense for the next seven years. Seven years in which everything happened. Including a pandemic and sort of the end of Lo Noir’s reign.
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Because yes, Happy Valley stood out a lot back then as a sort of British Fargo and at the same time a very dark and direct portrait of the way violence is perpetrated against women with no remedy and no control – the daughter of the protagonist, who put it on after she had had her child, haunted by the memory of the brutal sexual assault she had been the victim of; the perpetrator wasn’t even prosecuted, and he’s in jail, yes, but for drug trafficking – but it was a moment, 2014, when the cop changed his face and replaced testosterone detectives – 2014 is also the latest big hit that vein : True Detective – by female inspectors determined not to let the world fool them one bit. Think Stella Gibson, the sublimely stubborn Gillian Anderson from The Fall. Or the atypical Sarah Linden from The Killing.
James Norton (center) in a picture from Happy Valley Season 3.
Now the cop plays with a mystery more typical of other times – Daggers in the back: the Glass Onion Mysterium, The Crimes of the Academy or Only Murders in the Building – and takes refuge in a whodunnit, that is, that classic Who Made It by Agatha Christie, who somehow eludes the reality and the present that Wainwright so brutally portrays. And how does that affect the return to Happy Valley? Its value is the same – no matter how much time passes, it will always be a pioneer in a sense – but it seems taken out of context. Although, as Sergeant Cawood would say, in the face of life, one can only “fight or flee,” and she came to fight. Nothing will bother him in the slightest. Unless his upcoming retirement counts. He has seven months, a week and three days left when this third and final season begins, and one final encounter with the indirect killer of his daughter and father of his grandson, Tommy Lee Royce.
The present breaks into that time – let’s remember, seven years after we left: Royce was in prison and had found out he was Ryan’s father; Catherine’s sister was still clean and had started dating a certain Neil; the inspector’s ex-husband was still trapped in a boring marriage and had more feelings for her than anyone; Drugs, as always, were ubiquitous in the area – first in the form of ancient murder and later other types of violence against women and other forms of drug use. The murder is that of Gary Grakowski, a key character in season one—whom the inspector recognizes in the unbeatable opening scene, though she finds little more than his skull—the violence is that of a controlling professor, and the drugs, over-the-counter diazepam, um to disappear in small doses.
A picture from the third season of “Happy Valley”.
Family as a mutated axis
You could say the new old scenario of forever, to which is added the knowledge that Ryan started visiting his father in prison when he was 16. Thus Royce returns to Catherine’s life for the last and most dreaded time. Among the myriad of interesting things addressed by Wainwright’s cop is the idea of the family as a dysfunctional and mutant entity. But also and above all how to deal with a possible genetic set. Since season one, faced with the uncontrollable rage of her then eight-year-old grandson, Catherine has feared she is raising a monster who might have the same impulses as her father. This need for power can end in the worst possible way, because, as Cawood never tires of repeating, “Rape has less to do with sex than with power.” The idea of evil itself is primarily about power.
In any case, Catherine is close to retirement. He has bought an old Land Rover with which he wants to drive to the Himalayas. He knows that most cops die within five years of retirement and can’t adjust to life after work. But that won’t happen to her, she says. She counts the seconds. “I’m finally going to be the person I always wanted to be,” she says. Sergeant Cawood will fight to the end. Not just against the villains, but against everything that was said or thought about someone like them. If the 2014 series opened with a visit to the cemetery where Katharina’s daughter and the poet Sylvia Plath are buried, then with good reason. We don’t deserve – they don’t, their grandchildren don’t – a story we can’t change, Wainwright tells us. And so it is.
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