I think it’s pretty safe to say that Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright stuck the landing during this week’s incredible series finale.
The most heartening thing about the conclusion to this for-the-history-books crime drama was that it didn’t rely on shock deaths or big last-minute twists.
Instead, the climax we got was just the two people we care about most, Sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) and her arch nemesis Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), in a kitchen, finally saying the things to each other they’ve wanted to say since episode one.
At almost every point Wainwright sidestepped the audience’s expectations about what we might see or how things would play out and almost every decision she made seems borne out of character rather than plot.
Happy Valley’s fantastic finale
In the last episode we saw Tommy (James Norton) communicating with his estranged son Ryan via games console, certainly setting up that there might be a final battle for the boy’s love between Catherine and Tommy.
But that was off the table within minutes of this episode starting when Ryan told police about these conversations. Less dramatic, maybe, but far more realistic and told us everything we needed to know about where Ryan was as a character.
In another bold move that shows how confident a writer Wainwright is, she also essentially killed off Tommy 20 minutes before the final showdown.
After being stabbed in a remarkably brutal knife fight with the local mobsters, Tommy was a dead man walking, so that meant when Catherine arrived home to find him sitting in her kitchen, the threat he’s posed all through the series was basically gone.
What followed was an absolute masterclass in writing and acting.
The blows may only have been verbal, but what happened in the nearly 15-minute two-hander was a far more satisfying way for these old enemies to finish it.
The fact Wainwright could even draw out flickers of sympathy for psychopathic Tommy shows how remarkable she is as a writer.
Sally Wainwright has made a career out of creating amazing television, but Happy Valley might well be her masterpiece.
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