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Warning: spoilers for the first two episodes of Bad Sisters season two.
The final image of Bad Sisters season one was unabashed joy. Anne-Marie Duff’s character Grace, a woman worn translucent by her abusive husband JP and the aftermath of his well-deserved murder, threw off her clothes and leapt into the sea with her sisters. Swimming at Dublin’s Forty Foot was a Garvey family tradition that JP (rightly dubbed “The Prick”) had stopped Grace from joining. Now that she was free of him and his violent, coercive control, she could finally swim again. It was beautiful.
The final image of Bad Sisters season two, episode two feels like a baffling betrayal of that happy ending. Instead of a woman joyfully leaping back to life, we see her car flipped onto its roof, and the Gardaí wordlessly deliver her teenage daughter to her sister Eva (Sharon Horgan), who howls in pain. Eva has cared for her four younger sisters since their parents died decades ago in – what else – a car accident. To kill off Grace in the same way not two years after she finally returned to life? The world can be that cruel, but does TV drama have to be too?
Perhaps Grace will survive the accident and the Garvey sisters will, eventually, be whole again. If not, then it’s very hard not to wish that Apple TV+ had nixed the whole idea of a second season, and those five women were still out there, splashing and shrieking with laughter in the freezing Irish sea. Yes, Grace was a killer, but no TV character has been less mourned than Claes Bang’s sadistic, conniving rapist JP. Whatever punishment Grace did or didn’t deserve, it wasn’t this.
The same logic can be used to reason away the nagging suspicion in episode one, that Grace’s whirlwind new husband Ian (Owen McDonnell) isn’t good news. Forgive the cynicism if this turns out to be wide of the mark, but thanks to JP, Grace and her daughter are vulnerable. Abusers know to home in on people who’ve been hurt before. If it turns out that underage Blanaid and not Grace, is Ian’s real target, then what is there to say except to suggest that Bad Sisters’ writers take some time off to hug some puppies and remember what happiness is.
Not that season one, which dealt with murder, rape, pregnancy loss, suicide, and coercive control, was happy, but its resolution – the sun that came out after all those clouds – was euphoric. Sisterhood was its enduring theme. The fierce love that burned between the funny, bickering, suffering but steel-strong Garvey women made you root for them. Of course they should get away with murder, nothing could be more morally just. With that canker in their family tree cut out, the Garveys could get on with living.
Except, no they couldn’t. Renewal for another run meant that more drama needed to be cooked up, and it duly has been. The flashforward cold open shows the panicked Garveys – minus Grace – about to dump a mystery body into the sea from the boot of a car. So far, so good, a nice game of ‘who’s the corpse’ for us to play over the eight-episode series. Is that Ian’s body wrapped in Becka’s cow-print Oodie? Is it unhinged oddball Angelica, played wonderfully by Fiona Shaw? The next seven episodes will tell. Everything was shaping up for another exhilarating go-around with the Garveys… and then Grace’s accident happened. A character who’d suffered so much that her sisters were willing to kill to bring her back to them, was handed even more suffering. As were her sisters, and her perhaps now-orphaned daughter.
The cause of Grace’s accident is an additional source of pain. She was put in that car, driving erratically (and perhaps under the influence of newly addicted-Ursula’s stolen pills), by her ex-neighbour Roger (Michael Smiley). Kindly Roger, with his gentle, distant love for Grace, was a sweet refrain in the first season, a breather from JP’s toxic cruelty. It showed that kindness existed for Grace, if only she could defeat the monster in her life. Roger helping Grace to cover up JP’s murder was benevolence itself, a selfless act that asked for little in return.
The Roger of season two is a changed man. Haunted by guilt and a heavy drinker, he’s been turned into a creeper. Necking champagne at Grace’s wedding, he ruins the party mood by evoking her promise not to forget him, and later threatens to confess all to the police. That’s what makes Grace confess the murder to Ian, which is what puts her on the road that night.
Season two isn’t all souring the resolutions of season one. There are already pockets of joy, from Thaddea Graham’s fresh-faced new detective character Una Hoolihan, to the delight that Fiona Shaw brings to any cast, to the tease that Becka (Eve Hewson) may be pregnant by her foot-in-mouth but endearing new boyfriend Joe. If Ian turns out to be straight-up and not a sexual predator, then the wedding itself was a beauty too.
But then there’s that car crash. If Grace went through everything she went through only to die at the roadside in a repeat of her parents’ premature deaths, loading grief upon grief to her sisters and daughter, then everything that was achieved by the season one finale has been wasted. Season two needs to pull some major manoeuvres in its remaining six episodes not to sour the memory of what was a nearly perfect first run. Let’s hope it can.
Bad Sisters season 2 continues on Wednesday November 20 on Apple TV+
The post Did Bad Sisters Season 2 Just Betray its Happy Ending? appeared first on Den of Geek.
