“All killers, you just have to meet the right person.” One misunderstanding turned into the worst possible scenario, and caused many losses. Let’s talk about the details. Warning: spoilers are present.
Throughout the miniseries, the local village vicar finds himself on the brink of his own morality when an unfortunate joke about his son Ben leads math tutor Janice to believe that the boy has an interest in child pornography.
In fact, it was, of course, not so. Harry just took the flash drive from the pedophile Edgar without thinking, and Ben tried to hide what he thought was his father’s regular porn when Janice opened the files. Now Harry is desperate to convince the teacher that his son is not a pedophile, but his pleas only strengthen her confidence that the teenager deserves to report him to the police.
This is literally the worst series of accidents – as a result, Janice is locked in the family basement, and Harry resigns himself to framing himself for possessing child pornography in order to protect his son, and commits murder by poisoning a woman with carbon monoxide. It gets even worse when Ben finds himself locked in the basement with her and his parents don’t know anything.
Meanwhile in the US, British reporter Beth Davenport hired a death row forensic psychologist to help find Janice, who sent her a vague but ominous message before she was kidnapped. Will he be able to figure out who brought her from across the Atlantic? Will he ever tell about his crime?
What happened to Janice?
Janice is definitely the worst option for kidnapping if you were planning on kidnapping someone. She is smart and manipulative. Wasting no time spreading his DNA around the family basement using blood and urine, knowing that it would secure the couple’s condemnation if found out.
A born loner, her only duties are work and weekly video chats with her sister in Canada. I mean, it’s not that hard to check her diary and see where she was last supposed to be, leading the police straight to the vicar’s house.
However, her mind doesn’t extend to “hearing more than five minutes”: she refuses to believe Harry and Mary’s protests that their son is innocent and that her going to the police will ruin his life before it even begins. In the end, the parents realize that they can’t stop her from going to the police if they let her go, so they decide to kill her.
Only their son Ben realizes that she is in the basement before the plan is set in motion when Harry accidentally locks it before sealing the door and letting the faulty heater do its thing and fill the room with carbon monoxide. Janice eventually survives her ordeal, but not for long. When the room fills with gas, she tries to get Ben to call the police, but instead, in a state of hallucination, he hits her with a hammer.
By the time Harry goes downstairs to check on her, she looks dead. Deciding to take the hit for his son, he discovers that she is still alive. But he is stopped from killing by Beth, who has determined where Janice is.
What happened to Harry and Mary?
Harry and Mary pledge to protect their son, but they do it stupidly. When Mary decides that Janice must die, Harry’s martyr complex kicks in again and decides to “do the right thing” and kill her himself. He then locks Mary in the house, passing her only a laptop and a coat through the window, while he himself sits in the house and waits for the gas to do its job.
Meanwhile, Mary finds Janice’s keys in her coat pocket and decides to hide the laptop in her house to hide evidence that they ever had it. But what she doesn’t count on is meeting Beth, who, with the help of one of Griff’s friends, has broken into Janice’s house in an attempt to find her.
Beth and Mary get into a fight. Mary in a panic grabs a bread knife and cuts Beth in the arm, and then decides to help her with the wound. As they leave the house, Beth falls down the stairs and Mary seizes the moment to escape. Mary calls Harry and leaves a voice message, Beth catches up with her outside.
In an attempt to escape from a pushy journalist, Mary takes to the road right under the wheels of a truck. She dies instantly and Beth now has a phone to track Janice’s whereabouts.
By the time Beth and her new pal Morag arrive at Harry’s house, the situation is even more complicated: the bloodied boy is running down the road from the crime scene. Beth heads to the house just in time to prevent Janice from being killed, but the protagonist has already reached breaking point after all his attempts to be “nice” have only made things worse. Griff’s team manages literally moments before the tragedy.
What happened to Griff?
Although he is in prison on the other side of the world, Jefferson Griff always has a plan. In fact, he was able to easily determine where Janice was after his colleagues looked at her Facebook profile and tracked down the diary.
A cunning forensic scientist serving time in prison for the brutal murder of his wife and her beheading sent the group to Harry’s house under the pretense of burying his wife’s head in his basement (he still hasn’t told the authorities where her head went). His wife was the daughter of a mobster, and even a severe beating on his part was not enough to tell about the place of her burial. And that means he is guaranteed the death penalty.
Griff later arranges a phone call with Harry, who has been arrested and is now in jail for everything he did to Janice. Together, the couple reflect on their crimes, knowing that each had a “reason”, even if it was wrong.
Grif still refuses to confess the whereabouts of his wife’s head and the reasons for her murder. Instead, he tells Harry, “That’s a story for another day, maybe you’ll be the one I tell it to. You and me are the same now. There are moments that make us all killers.”
“Insider”: Steven Moffat trolls modern detectives
Steven Moffat put together all the oldest detective clichés and the favorite trick of inept screenwriters, when the characters do idiotic things not because they are idiots, but because the writer did not figure out how else to move the plot forward, and made a 4-episode show out of this explosive mixture -parody.
In 2022, the parody mini-series The Woman in the House Opposite the Girl in the Window was released , which can be called the standard of the genre. With humor, the creators of the series were all right, and they used this powerful weapon to the fullest. Steven Moffat went a little too far with the subtlety of humor: many viewers watched the show in all seriousness and burst into angry criticism of him. But it turned out to create a quite nice super-detective of a new format – Griff in the sparkling performance of Stanley Tucci, along with his neighbor with a photographic memory ( Alkins Estimond). Griff is overly self-confident and absolutely arrogant, enjoys fantastic preferences while on death row: customers are brought to him, they bring a phone if needed, etc. and so on. This alone should have made viewers realize that this is far from believable. And take a closer look at everyone else. And the brilliant criminologist loves to utter cheap maxims, which are also nothing more than a parody of numerous detective stories about profilers / psychologists who explore the human essence and sin with thoughtfulness.
“We are all killers. You just need to find the right person .” – Griff
There will be spoilers ahead, so be careful. The Insider offers the wildest clichés and laughs at them himself. It is impossible not to notice this. And the number of stupid things that the main character does, and in fact he is still a vicar, is simply prohibitive, but it is thanks to them that the plot “works to the fullest”! The explanation for everything he does at the vicar’s is one: ” Because I’m a damn vicar !” And David Tennat pronounces this phrase in a different way: now with pride, now conciliatoryly, now with despair. And there is something to despair of: just one stupid act, contrary to everything we have ever thought about the vicars of God on earth, sets off a chain of events one more impossible than the other, and Steven Moffat will help make them even more stupid than they could be!
And really, why take a flash drive (who uses flash drives now, by the way?) with porn, carry it home, leave it in the hallway with the keys, why allow the son to give it to the tutor, and then make excuses so helplessly? There are a million of these monstrous “scenario holes” here. But those aren’t holes, bro. Keep Calm, Take It Easy. This is a PARODY. Enjoy the way Moffat beats modern detectives, and his heroes will help you.
An abyss of comicality in the wailing of the vicar’s wife about how much it takes to provide for a murder! How ominously Janice recounts how she marked the basement area with every possible natural sign! And the suicide note is trolling of the highest level!
“All killers. All it takes is a good reason and a bad day.” – Griff
At the end of episode 4, Moffat takes the classic plot twist about how serial killers fool investigators and give wrong clues, hide burial sites, and turns him inside out. Griff uses his desire to find the head of his murdered wife to send people to the vicarage. He does it with every possible disrespect. Bravo Stanley Tucci, this role suits him very well!
And a brilliant ending: a mathematician will come to our genius of criminology with an offer to help her commit a murder. Yes, yes, this right grymza has planned a terrible thing. The BBC simply has to renew the show for a second season. I want to see it and find out in the end what’s wrong with his wife’s head.
