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Warning: contains major Bad Sisters season one finale spoilers.
In the final episode of Bad Sisters season one, the recently widowed Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) says goodbye to her neighbour Roger (Michael Smiley). Grace has sold the house that she used to share with her now-dead, abusive husband Jean-Paul (Claes Bang), and is taking their teenage daughter to move in with her older sister Eva (Sharon Horgan). Grace thanks Roger for all his help, and when he asks her not to forget him, promises that she won’t. How could she? Roger is one of just two men who know Grace’s secret.
The other is Matt Claffin (Daryl McCormack), the brother of insurance man Thomas Claffin (Brian Gleeson). Thomas spent the first season of Irish comedy-drama Bad Sisters doing his damnedest to prove that Grace’s husband Jean-Paul (known to her four sisters as “The Prick”) had been killed instead of dying in an accident. If he could prove murder, Thomas could save the family firm he and Matt had inherited after their father died by suicide. Their dad had been in financial trouble and had spent client insurance contributions without first registering the policies, meaning that there was no pot of money from which to pay out claims. If forced to pay out JP’s 875,000 euro claim, the Claffins would have been bankrupted and found guilty of fraud.
Unbeknown to Thomas, whose wife was heavily pregnant with their first child at the time, Matt had fallen for the youngest of the five Garvey sisters – Becka (Eve Hewson). As their relationship developed, so did the brothers’ suspicions that the Garvey sisters had killed JP.
In the season one finale, Matt found physical evidence of the murder at the cabin where JP’s body was found. He then overheard the sisters discussing the murder and its cover-up, and was begged by Becka not to report them. Eventually, Matt decided to burn his evidence, and in exchange, Grace withdrew her claim on JP’s life insurance. The Claffins’ family firm survived, Thomas’ wife gave birth to a healthy baby girl, the Garvey sisters dodged prison for their role in JP’s death, and Grace and the others were finally free of the Prick. A happy ending, in other words, but in season two, somebody’s guilt is about to threaten that happiness.
Who Killed JP?
Despite Grace’s sisters – without her knowledge – trying to poison, shoot with an arrow, drown, freeze and explode JP to protect Grace and their niece Blanaid (Saise Quinn) from his abuse, Grace turned out to be the one who killed him. At their cabin, Grace strangled JP to death using his pyjama bottoms after he punched her hard in the stomach and told her that a decade earlier, he had impregnated her sister Eva (who had subsequently lost the pregnancy). Grace knew that JP had raped Eva and strangled him for it, and for the years of abuse she’d suffered by his hand.
Inspired by watching a film about the death of Isadora Duncan, who died by asphyxiation when a scarf she was wearing became tangled in the axel of a car, Grace set the stage for JP’s “accidental” death. She put his body on a quadbike and wrapped a long red scarf she’d just knitted around his neck, tangling it in the mechanism before sending it all crashing into a tree. Except, Grace didn’t work alone.
What Did Roger Do?
JP was as vindictive and cruel to his neighbour Roger Muldoon as he was to everybody else. Jealous of the friendly rapport Roger had with Grace, JP attempted to entrap him by posing online as a young boy in Roger’s church youth group and luring him into a sexual discussion. When Roger didn’t incriminate himself, JP made an anonymous complaint to the police naming Roger as a paedophile. Roger was cleared of wrongdoing after the police took away his computer, but he lost his role in the church and his standing in the community. As a result, in season two, he’s has moved out of his home and is now living with his sister Angelica, a new character played by Killing Eve’s Fiona Shaw.
On the night that Grace killed JP, Roger had gone to the cabin to confront him about his harmful lies. Seeing Grace’s predicament, he helped her to stage JP’s ‘accident’, though she edited his involvement out of the version she told her sisters, making it a secret shared just by the two of them.
What Happened to JP’s Mother, Father and Sister?
As far as we know, they’re all dead and JP was responsible for at least one and very likely two of those deaths. JP was a disturbed child who displayed early psychopathic tendencies. As a boy, he collected frogs, named them, and then drowned them in glasses of milk. In childhood, he had a sister named Laura who was seen in a family photo album holding a cat named Miso and wearing a pair of red dungarees. “Laura is gone now,” her mother Minna (Nina Norén) told Becka, and she doesn’t expect her to come back. After young JP is seen later in the album dressed in Laura’s clothes and holding her cat, it’s assumed that he was behind her death.
Minna died when she was accidentally locked into her husband’s walk-in freezer by Becka, who thought that she was locking JP in there. JP discovered his mother’s frozen body, moved it to her bed and told the police that she died in her sleep.
In the freezer, Minna discovered that the husband she thought had walked out on their family without leaving a trace was in fact dead and had been stored there for decades. In flashback, we see JP asking his taxidermist father for money, and being denied. When his father then accidentally starts to choke on a glass eye, JP does nothing to help and coldly watches him die before storing his corpse in the deep freeze and collecting on his pension for decades. After Minna freezes to death, JP puts his father’s body into a suitcase and throws it into the pond outside the family home.
How Did JP Hurt the Garvey Sisters?
He physically and psychologically abused Grace, coercively controlling her behaviour, isolating her from her sisters, and sapping her strength until she was terrified to say a word or do anything against him. He was a misogynist and an over-strict parent who shamed their young daughter and accused her aunt Eva of grooming and sexualising her when she bought her the bra for which Blanaid was too scared to ask her parents.
Years before, he raped Eva when she was too drunk to consent during a weekend away at the cabin. She became pregnant, and the miscarriage and aftermath of the attack led to the failure of her long-term relationship.
JP tortured Bibi by driving her dangerously fast, despite knowing that she was traumatised because the Garvey sisters’ parents had both died in a road accident when she was young. He caused the crash in which she lost her eye.
When JP found out that Ursula was having an extra-marital affair, he tortured her too, by threatening to tell her husband Donal, and manipulating her into sending him nudes. Then he led Becka on by telling her that he would lend her money to start her massage business, waiting for her to over-commit herself financially, and then not delivering the money and pretending that he had never offered it. Becka was so traumatised by the guilt of having caused the death of Minna that she came close to drinking a powerful barbiturate that would have killed her, but stopped in time.
Episodes one and two of Bad Sisters season two stream on Apple TV+ from Wednesday November 13, followed by weekly episodes on Wednesdays until Monday December 23.
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