Marcella Season 2 Episode 7 review

This article comes from Den of Geek UK.

This review contains spoilers.

Marcella Season 2, Episode 7 review

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog from barking with the juicy bone. Silence the pianos, and with muffled drum, bring out the coffin. Let the mourners come.

Bow your head (and mute your phone) in a moment’s silence please, for Techy Mark.

[…]

Edgware Road Station won’t see his like again. Nor will it ever solve a case again, because without Techy Mark’s computing skills or Marcella’s impeccable knack for leaping into the dark and landing immediately on the right conclusion, it’s now lost its two best officers. After this case is over, DS Backland will be transferred elsewhere – either to another station or to the pavement beneath the current one, depending on how son Edward’s encounter with our killer ends.

That’s right. We now think we know who’s been abducting children, sewing magic Pogs into their abdomen and drilling holes in their brains. It isn’t Maya Whitman or Jojo the vet or redhead Sasha or Dr Lewis. It’s… Samantha’s mummy, the kind-faced, corkscrew-headed, cardigan-wearing PTA member who’s been drifting around inconsequentially all series. Jane Colletti: a devil in an A-line denim skirt.

Perhaps we should have seen it coming. To paraphrase Brian Clough, if a player isn’t interfering with play, then they shouldn’t be on the pitch. Jane Colletti has been on the pitch episode after episode without appearing to even come near the ball. Now we learn that she’s not only been kicking the ball, she’s been dribbling it and passing it and doing nutmegs with it and secretly heading it into a net of murder and deception.

If only we’d taken the time to check her name for anagrams when she first popped up in episode two: Jane Colletti = Jail Colt Teen and Acne Jello Tit. It’s been staring us right in the face.

A long, sharp thing is about to stare poor Edward in the face if Marcella doesn’t rescue her youngest. Having decided that Edward is an abuser in waiting and therefore requires the magic Pog treatment, Samantha’s mummy appears to have drugged his hot chocolate. Our penultimate episode cliff-hanger saw the mouse-squeezing teen unconscious on the Colletti parquet flooring, awaiting the killer’s treatment.

It wasn’t what you’d call satisfying, the Samantha’s mummy reveal. There was no Keyser Söze ‘of course!’ realisation that it could only ever have been thus. Until forty-three minutes in, when Edward did a double take at the bronze car we glimpsed for the briefest of moments in his hypnosis memory, the killer could still have been anyone. Until she mentioned having helped to deliver a baby at work, we didn’t know she had medical experience and was therefore a suspect. How Jane’s managed to hold down a job, raise her daughter alone and leave a trail of corpses as long as her cardigans behind her it’s hard to tell.

Let’s remember that, if she’s our killer, Samantha’s mummy hasn’t only murdered seventeen children in the past nine years and stashed their bodies all over London in some kind of macabre treasure hunt, in the fortnight during which this series has taken place, she’s also drugged and abducted another two kids, and killed a car salesman, a cyclist, a lorry driver, a nice retired couple, Nigel’s girlfriend and his dog. Talk about ‘I don’t know how she does it’. All that, and her house is as neat as a pin. The woman must never sleep.

Unless… she isn’t acting alone. If Jane Colletti is part of a ring encompassing Dr Lewis, Becky and the Kids Call women, then at least all the time and brainpower we’ve spent keeping tabs on series two’s ever-multiplying plot threads wouldn’t feel wasted. Like Rav, his askew tie a symbol of his grief, we’ve been going mad trying to piece it all together. “The guy who shot at Debbie Canavan’s sister is blackmailing Vince…” said Rav. Yes, and he’s the brother of the missing care assistant who took down the message from the paralysed man who has something to do with Marcella’s estranged husband’s fiancée, on whom the police officer spying on Marcella was blackmailed into digging up some dirt, while the vet who volunteers for the charity of which Tim is the chairperson is going out with the woman paid to frame Vince for embezzlement, whose files were then used to frame Tim for the same embezzlement and… and… and….

No wonder Marcella felt the need to draw all over the office window in different coloured pens (the cleaners must love her). It’s been a migrainous knot, and it’s suddenly very close to feeling all for naught. If the carefully laid trails leading between the victims and Kids Call were red herrings, and everything else until now has been too (by failing to come clean about the overdosed teenager on their sofa, Reg and Alan at least played their part in kick-starting Jane’s psychopathy I suppose), it’s all starting to feel like a bit of a cheat.

All that’s left now is the final confrontation. Will Marcella rescue Edward? Will Samantha’s mummy and her abuse-cycle-stopping mission be brought to an end? Which way will our heroine step off that ledge? And finally, does anyone else really fancy a hot chocolate while we wait?