3x08 Episode 8

[7.4/10] I’m not entirely sure what Broadchurch is trying to say in its final bow. On the one hand, at the last minute, it pulls back from the “all men are trash” message it seemed to be pedaling (petal-ing?) for most of the season. Hardy all but says as much to an appropriately aghast Miller.

The show doesn’t excuse Ed’s stalking of Trish and acknowledges that his suffering pales in comparison to hers. But it also shows him genuinely trying to help solve the case (even if he’s clumsy in the effort), and depicts him as riddled with guilt having overheard the crime but mistaken it for a consensual act, now kicking himself for having failed to stop it.

Even Clive, the piece of shit cabbie who hit his stepson, cheated on his wife, and held onto random people’s keys shows a shred of decency. He wants to fall on the sword so that his stepson doesn’t have to. He lies to protect this kid that he knocks around. He’s still an utter shit who deserves to face punishment for his complicity in all of this, but there’s an unexpected altruistic streak in the man you’d least expect it from.

Then, of course, there’s Mark, the original crappy male role model on this show (at least until Joe’s crimes were revealed). He too hit his son, cheated on his wife, lied and kept things from his family, and ultimately saw his mistakes turned into a means of exculpating his child’s murderer. He is the poster child for cruddy men in Broadchurch.

And yet, by the end of the series, he is a changed and broken man, brought low by his mistakes and haunted by what they’ve cost him: justice and, more importantly, his son. He’s had his moment of clarity about who he is. He feels estranged from his family, reveling in the spiritual equivalent of a last meal with them and the memory of his boy, before deciding that he can’t be in this place anymore. He’s been hollowed out, and Broadchurch only stands as a reminder of the man he used to be, the man who can’t move on. It’s sad, but it’s honest, and a sign that there’s a wounded human being beneath even one of the worst people on the show.

None of this makes it better. Ed’s daughter is still aghast at her father’s behavior and can no longer be confident that he wouldn’t commit such an awful crime. Clive can’t save his stepson and has hurt his wife almost as badly. And in what is perhaps the realest scene Broadchurch has ever put on, Beth admits to Mark that they can’t be together, that what went wrong with them predated Danny’s death, and as much as they still love one another, it doesn’t work anymore. It’s stark and harrowing and the exact opposite of the soap opera-like drama the show spun for the couple in its first season. But even on the verge of going their separate ways, Beth and Mark recognize their shared humanity, the versions of each other they once loved, the children that will always bind them together, despite past mistakes.

In short, they all contain multitudes, neither fully good nor bad. Each is capable of doing terrible things, but also of displaying empathy, compassion, self-recognition, and enough hurt to show that men like these may have deep flaws, but they’re still human beings, and still capable of doing good.

But then there’s Leo the Twine Guy, and Leo is a monster. I’m not sure what Broadchurch means to say with that. I believe, however, that it’s something about pornography and other aspects of rape culture devaluing sex and reducing other human beings to objects who can provide it in the eyes of impressionable young men.

Maybe that’s unfair. You can read Leo two ways. On the one hand, maybe he was simply born a sociopath, someone incapable of processing the feelings of others beyond his own immediate needs. Maybe porn didn’t corrupt him; it just fed urges that were already there, hastened their being made manifest, only quickening the pace of something inevitable regardless. Maybe this disposable pleasure, and the ease of accessing the “harder stuff’ just sped Leo along down a path he was already on.

Or maybe, it turned him into this monster. It feels like Broadchurch leans more toward this latter theory than the former. It seems to be trying to say that Leo was once a lonely kid like Michael, maybe one who also faced physical abuse by his father, who took refuge in more and more extreme erotica until it provoked him to try his hand at the same in real life. Nobody ever comes out and says it, but the episode seems to implicitly make the argument that if it weren’t for porn, this all might never have happened.

Leo watches hours of it. He decides to shoot his own when that’s not good enough. He grooms Michael by sharing it with him. And the corruption spreads. Michael ends up pushed to greater and greater extremes by his erstwhile mentor. He eventually possesses the nude photos of Hardy’s daughter spread around the school. He shares the same smut with Miller’s son.

There’s the ingredients of a moral panic here, a subtle warning that youth with unfettered access to the infinite erotic outlets of the internet will ultimately be corrupted, made monstrous by it, or hurt by it, if not all three. I don’t know how to feel about that seemingly provincial perspective, where the alternatives are some combination of “smut will corrupt the youth” and “some boys are just born monsters and will, in turn, make your children into monsters or victims too.”

But either way, the glory of a series finale is that you no longer have to contend with the aftereffects or your ideas or your message anymore, at least not in the story! And this episode offers capstones and endings to most of Broadchurch’s (whittled down) list of major players. Maggie’s decided to become a vlogger. (Uh...good luck with that.) Rev. Coates is giving up the Broadchurch pulpit, though it’s not clear where he’s headed from here, something rather bittersweet. All the major characters show up for his final service. Daisy hugs her dad and tells him she’s proud of him, which is very sweet. And even Trish and Ian manage to reach some detente, much to their daughter’s delight.

Frankly, I wish we had more of Trish. So much of this season has rightfully centered on her pain and her experience of all this, and we get comparatively little about how she feels after the culprits are exposed. There’s a form of relief at the knowledge her attacker was not someone she knew, someone she’d trusted. But then there’s the more complicated emotions that come from the information that it was just some random kids, who targeted you not because of anything you’d said or done, but because you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those are difficult revelations to sit with, and Broadchurch spends very little time on what they mean to Trish and her road to recovery.

Despite that, we do get fine capstones to our main characters here. The personal lives of Hardy and Miller got less focus here than in prior seasons, but what we get suggests a nice landing spot for them. Alec has made peace with his daughter and with this place, finding the groove he was in desperate need of when he arrived. Ellie and her kids join Beth and hers for a Sunday meal, a relationship repaired after both families have been through so much. The Latimers are not better, and some parts of who they were cannot be repaired, but they still hold onto those little joys, like good times with dear friends and days they wished had never faded into the mists of the past.

And Hardy and Miller are still friends! Just friends! Chummy colleagues! Thank god! (This is where I admit I was afraid the show would pair them up eventually, and I was rooting for it to pair up Beth and Rev. Coates.) Broadchurch resists the urge to show them having become the best of buddies, let alone an item, or otherwise have Hardy give a speech about how much he’s learned and changed. It ends on a note of “life goes on.” Things change and relationships evolve, but not always in the warm and friendly (or dramatic) direction that tends to be presented on T.V. There’s restraint to the final scene between the series’ two main stars, and I appreciate it.

In the final tally, the show’s two big stars consistently shined and elevated all of the material given to them. While not quite to the level of a Breaking Bad, the show’s visuals were spot-on, often lush, and vital to how the series made meaning. And while the writing and storytelling were inconsistent, when the show was on, it was on, crafting compelling moments and heart-rending scenes.

The ringing words Broadchurch leaves us with are “love and good deeds.” Those are small, but remarkable concepts to build your last big thought around. There have certainly been plenty of both in this beachside town, but also equal and opposite levels of moral degradation and bad works. The hidden hurts and abuses lurking in an idyllic town is not a new phenomenon on television, but this show has always tried to suggest there is a balance even in these tucked away places.

Places like these are not perfect little bastions of quaintness and goodness, nor are they well-kept cesspools of crime and abuse. They are, like the men and women who populate them, full of good and bad, capable of rising or succumbing to each when the moment calls for it. I’d like to think that Broadchurch still recognizes that, rather than miring its perspective in pearl-clutching paranoia. But there’s enough depth in its worst characters, and enough flaws in its best, to light the path either way.