Sweetpea Shows The Advantages of Not Being Seen

 

 

Spoiler Warning for Season 1 of Sweetpea:

 

My memory is not what it used to be  but I believe one of the first Monty Python sketches I saw was one from Season 2: “How Not To Be Seen”. It’s a filmed segment set in the woody sections of London and it features John Cleese as his unctuous narrator telling us that ‘in this picture’ so and so ‘can not be seen’. The first two times someone stands up when they are called, they are shot. They eventually learn not to stand up but then the places they hide behind explode and, well, it escalates from there.

Considering that one of the catchphrases for the just completed Sweetpea is “People don’t really see me” and that the action in the series takes place in one of those small Yorkshire villages that the Pythonites peopled with salt-of-the earth idiots and who, apart from having iPhones and social media, don’t seem to have gained much intellect in the half century since, one could look at Rhiannon Lewis, played to dark and hysterical perfection by Ella Purnell, as by saying the advantage of not being seen is that you can get away with murder. But as the series approached its final episodes we learned something that Rhiannon seems incapable of learning she’s thought she’s been invisible for so long that she hasn’t really been paying attention to other people.

She spent most of Season 1 obsessed with abducting and murdering Julia Blankenship, the middle school bully who we have thought made her life miserable and has forced to be the kind of person she is her whole life. In that mindset, the two murders she had committed to that point – both of horrible men who were themselves bullies – justified the brutal killings she committed. The problem is, and the writers do a brilliant job of making it clear in the episodes that follow, it is that Rhiannon is so convinced in her image as a milquetoast that she wants to draw attention to herself.

The death of her father is supposedly the impetus that leads her down this path and its something we want to believe far longer than the series lets us. But by the end of the series, we’re getting a very clear picture of Rhiannon, one that turns from a mostly sympathetic character until we realize, reluctantly, that she’s really closer to Walter White than we hoped. What’s happened to her has brought about the person she really was all along.

The problem is, for one thing, she’s not nearly as clever as Walter and certainly not a good judge of human nature. This becomes very clear when she manages to abduct Julia at the halfway point of the series but before she can kill her she eludes Rhiannon’s grasp and she spends the next two episodes tied up. To this point Julia has seemed like the bully and monster in every observation of her and there are clearly flaws in her character. When Rhiannon tries to convince her to confess to being a bitch Julia goes out of her way to act as if Rhiannon’s crazy. We want to believe that Julia’s so genuinely sociopathic that she’s determine to gaslight Rhiannon all the way to the end or that she’s going to push Rhiannon so far that she’ll kill her to shut up. The problem is Rhiannon goes to see Julia’s fiancée Marcus as part of an interview, mainly to find out just how horrible Julia is.

By this point Rhiannon is taking on the nature of the classic serial killer: she’s now listing Julia as the third potential victim and reported her as missing. The fact that she hasn’t killed Julia yet does show that she’s becoming reckless as well as arrogant: she wants to have the scoop ahead of the other reporters and by this point she genuinely thinks the staff isn’t smart enough to know she could get away with it. When she goes to his house she steals wine and makes a mess in secret and she also wants to find out dirt on Julia. When she ends up learning that Marcus is a monster – and has in fact been regularly emotionally and physically abusing Julia for years – it changes things immensely.

By the penultimate episode she’s determined to ‘rescue’ Julia from Marcus and it doesn’t occur to her by this point that Julia may have realized this is the only way out of both predicaments she’s in. The series is clever enough to make it unclear whether this is out of the dual traumas or whether or not Julia genuinely might see a way to use Rhiannon after all this – and in either case, it’s worth noting she’d still have the clearer moral compass. By this point Julia has made it clear that Rhiannon may be using Julia as a scapegoat for her  own shit life – and that Rhiannon doesn’t seem to have realized it.

Marcus, it’s worth noting, does deserve to die;  when he comes to ‘rescue’ Julia, he immediately becomes the kind of emotional terror he’s clearly been during their whole relationship. He blames her for being kidnapped and is sure she’s been raped  - and that she asked for it. He takes on a pattern in his final moments of both being an incel and a misogynist and the fact that Rhiannon just walks out of the shadow and pushes him over the balcony – in front of Julia – shows that she’s reached a new level of her psychosis.

In the season finale Rhiannon is face-to-face with Marina (Leah Harvey) the one cop on the entire force who has figured out that she is the killer that has been stalking the town. Fittingly the teaser begins with both women using the line ‘People I’d love to kill’ and saying ‘this bitch’ to each other in the voiceover.

Marina should be the sympathetic character: like Rhiannon she is clearly bullied at her job, overlooked by her bosses and is the only cop who knows who they’re looking for. But the writers go out of their way to show that Marina is, in many ways, the other side of the coin as Rhiannon including the fact that she’s defying her superiors, following hunches instead of orders and perhaps most importantly violating the rules of evidence. These are the kind of things that would have made characters like her a hero even a few years earlier in procedurals so the fact that her boss chews her out for violating every rule possible – and the fact she acts like a dick to her superiors – is a funny sort of progress.

Rhiannon wants to move on with her life during the final episode but even before the final minutes its clear she’s in the midst of a semi-deluded state. Julia spends the night hanging out with her getting drunk and celebrating her freedom but the fact that Rhiannon really thinks that the two can be friends – just hours after she was prepared to kill her – shows that Julia has a clearer perception of things than she does. When the two go into the newsroom in the final scene with them together, Julia describes her captivity and hostage situation in terms vague enough that could refer to her life with Marcus but which Rhiannon knows very well could refer to the last two days. Julia disappears at the end of the episode and its not clear what will happen next between them.

By this point the edges of Rhiannon’s veneer have begun to flake. When she finds Marina in her home (the DI broke into her house the previous night) Marina tells her in no uncertain terms she knows the truth. She might not be able to use it evidence but she’s on to Rhiannon’s little game now. She knows, perhaps before Rhiannon does, that she will kill again. In their final scene Rhiannon starts taking on the veneer of the bullies she’s spent the series claiming she was fighting against.

Then comes her confrontation with Craig, who’s been nothing but warm and sweet to her the whole series even as he’s been trying to buy her father’s business from her. When she tells him “she just wants to be friends” he’s clearly hurt and pivots demanding that he sell the business. This would seem like a callous act but Craig’s already provided her with an alibi, so her treatment of him is very cold. She agrees to sell him the busy and tries to regain the moral high ground. He cuts her off and tells her flatly he doesn’t like the new her one bit.

That night AJ, the junior reporter who she’s been flirting with all season, comes to her home. The two of them have sex for the first time and it seems like a great things to come – and then AJ gets a text of the murder weapon, which he knows is Rhiannon’s.

The final scenes of the episodes are heartbreaking; we’ve seen versions of them before in countless movies and procedurals but never with the genders reversed and never with the man being so shocked. AJ has been one of the only moral forces of good in all of Sweetpea which no doubt meant he had to die. But the fact that Rhiannon kills him so brutally and without a second thought is one of the most daring things I’ve seen any TV series do. We’ve seen countless antiheroes commit countless murders over the last quarter of a century and we have seen quite a few women do the same in recent years. I didn’t think I had the capacity to be shocked by these kinds of killings any more.

So it says something for the writers that they manage to do so in the final episode with Rhiannon’s butchering of AJ. Any possibility of her being a sympathetic character may well have gone out the window: she’s violated the code of Dexter Morgan – never kill an innocent – in Season 1. And she may be exposed almost immediately: the last moment of the episode shows the front door of her home being opened and her sister – whose calls she’s been avoiding for the rest of the series – walking in the front door.

Sweetpea is one of the most imaginative, darkest and funniest – yes funniest – series I’ve seen in 2024. Ella Purnell has had a hell of 2024 and I suspect this performance, along with her work in Fallout,  will make her a favorite for awards nominations by both the Golden Globes and Critics Choice awards, depending on the category. I could see this series being categorized as a comedy and not have the same dispute I might with, say The White Lotus being called a drama.  Yes this is one of the bloodiest series of 2024 but it’s hard not to enjoy this in a way you might not be able to, say, 3-Body Problem or even The Bear. Rhiannon is honestly more likeable and relatable than so many of the other protagonists we’ve seen on dramas in recent years and Purnell lends a fair amount of comedy to her work along with the bloodlust. Many of the other performers, particularly Harvey and Jeremy Swift, show comic chops throughout and there is a very relatable tone throughout. I mean, who doesn’t want to kill the cashier when they’re talking on the phone instead of ringing up your groceries?

It's clear given the ending the show has the setup for a Season 2 and as I mentioned in my original review, it is based on a series of novels so its not like there isn’t enough material for quite a few season. The question, of course, will be not only the schedule of the writers but the cast. Purnell is going to need to film Season 2 of Fallout soon; Jeremy Swift might be returning to Ted Lasso and considering how many people didn’t survive season 1, they’re going to find new regulars. But I know there will no doubt be people – myself included – who would gladly wait the usual two to three years between seasons of British TV to watch Rhiannon make yet another list and see her face off against Maxine. In the meantime, always remember to be polite to the little waifs of the women of the world out there. They can clearly hold a grudge – and in Rhiannon’s case, a knife  as well.

My score: 4.5 stars.