Every season, GBH Drama prepares to bring you coverage of the latest and greatest in British dramas. This month, we're headed to Grantchester for the eight season of the show of the same name. With hot priests, mysterious murders, and a village full of capital C Characters, this show is sure to entertain. GBH Drama contributor Amanda-Rae Prescott is here to recap the magic as it happens.
This week on Grantchester, the halfway house is at the center of the investigation and the focal point of the personal life plots as well. One of the residents has died in suspicious circumstances. Both Leonard and Will blame themselves for what happened and Geordie is under pressure from residents and higher-ups about the house's existence. Let’s discuss what happened but first note that this episode discusses suicide and suicidal ideation.
Ping Pong Wars
The episode begins at the halfway house. There’s a ping pong table and the residents are competing for bragging rights. Will is playing against Alfie who is Italian. He claims he let Alfie win. Later on, Keith plays Alfie and they start arguing about the game. Keith insults Alfie’s heritage and punches are thrown. Duncan, another resident, also dislikes Alfie adding fuel to the fire. Will, Leonard, and the other residents struggle to break up the fight but eventually stop it.
Meanwhile, Martha, the housekeeper is arguing with Mrs. C over how the beef should be prepared. Mrs. C storms out because she’s offended. Judith, the only female resident, comes into the middle of the fight with a bleeding finger and makes Duncan faint. Will then treats Judith’s injury and she responds to the kindness by flirting with him. Leonard says he thought having a female resident would have been a stabilizing force for the other men. Daniel suggests to Leonard that they need a couple’s night and Leonard especially needs time away from caring for the residents. Leonard agrees to meet Daniel at his house. Finally, Leonard has a break from the stress!
Bloody Geordie
In between the ping pong, Geordie is loading up parts of an old pram into the car. Cathy is panicking because, due to the retirement threat, she has no desire to get pregnant or adopt another baby. Geordie reassures her that the pram is being recycled for Ernie’s new go-kart. Cathy then admits that she was offered a promotion at the department store. Geordie doesn’t have a happy reaction which of course angers Cathy. Men are indeed a problem for the women of Cambridge!
Alfie’s Confession
Martha asks if Will is going to stay at the halfway house for dinner but he declines because he wants to finish building the go-kart for Ernie’s birthday. Alfie then stops Will to talk to him. Will tells Alfie that he can’t perform a Catholic confession but he can listen to his story. Alfie reveals that he has considered suicide several times, because he feels responsible for the death of his ex-girlfriend. Before he went to prison he was dating a girl. It was a secret liaison, because her parents didn’t approve, and Alfie started drinking. One day he found out she died. Alfie tells Will the story because he believes him to be a good person. Will says that the sins of the past don’t define a person. Alfie then gives Will a bottle of pills to hold because he doesn’t trust himself. Unfortunately, Will’s guilt over his own recent accident is still so overwhelming that he tells Alfie that he can’t help him. Will returns to the church to pray, hoping to hear God’s voice again.
Leonard and Daniel return to the halfway house the next morning. Keith is passed out from drunkenness. Daniel’s camera is gone. Does that mean someone broke in? They search around the property for evidence of an intruder only to find Alfie’s dead body in the shed. The injuries at first glance appear to indicate suicide. Geordie and Will come to investigate what happened. Geordie orders Will to focus on helping Leonard while he handles the actual event. Will tells Leonard he believes he failed Alfie by walking away from his confession. Leonard tells Will he did what they were trained to do. Leonard believes it’s his fault Alfie died because he wasn’t there that night, but it’s possible Leonard could have died if he’d been there, instead of with Daniel. Geordie then determines that Alfie’s injuries were staged to appear like suicide and that in reality, he was hit in the back of the head. Geordie asks all the residents to stay until he finishes investigating what happened.
Heightened Suspicions
Geordie and Will’s next step is to figure out each resident’s alibi for the evening before. Keith said he was playing cards, then got drunk and locked Duncan in his bedroom overnight. Mikey claims he was out with his girlfriend all night. Judith is missing and no one knows where she went after the ping pong game. Geordie and Will then search Alfie’s room for any clues. They find a bottle with traces of chloroform which also disproves the robbery theory. Leonard says he doesn’t keep any files on the residents because his mission is not to judge people. Geordie says that practice is a bad idea because it’s clear Judith is soliciting and access to alcohol is too easy. Larry asks the neighbors for information, but no one claims to have seen anything. Martha also says she didn’t see anything.
Keith is taken to the station for questioning because of the ping pong fight. He tells Geordie that even though he didn’t directly fight in World War II, he still hates Mussolini and the Italians for what they did to British soldiers. He won’t reveal the offense he did time for, because he wants to forget the past. Geordie then tells Leonard and Daniel they have to be formally questioned because Elliot ordered it. The audience knows both of them spent the night together, but they tell the cops that Leonard met up with Will for prayer group, and Daniel went home alone to read a book about someone who was wrongly accused. Leonard believes Daniel’s statement is too antagonistic considering both of them have faced police harassment in the past. He worries that the investigation could result in the halfway house being shut down. Miss Scott tells Geordie that Elliot is mad because he had a bad date the night before.
Keith is the next resident questioned. He admits he has a history of being violent, if he doesn’t get blackout drunk. Keith also has a tattoo of a cobra on his hand symbolizing the old gang he used to run with. Keith, it turns out, is not his real name; he changed it from Sanjeev to assimilate into British society, but was still treated horribly by racists. He also claims he saw Alfie threaten Judith with a knife. If Keith’s claim is true, this gives her motive. Geordie also looks through Alfie’s files and discovers that he did 3 years in jail for a robbery, and that he was questioned over the death of a girl but was later released because the death was ruled a suicide. Miss Scott is then asked to find Alfie’s immigration records for additional clues.
Back at the halfway house, someone throws a brick at one of the windows. Leonard refuses to call the police because he believes it will make the situation worse. Daniel believes Leonard isn’t taking the threat seriously. Will also tries to reason with Leonard but it isn’t working because Mikey is angry that Leonard isn’t stopping the opponents to the house. They hear noises upstairs, and find Judith hurriedly stuffing money in her shirt. She also has Daniel’s camera in her purse.
At the police station, she confirms Keith’s story about the knife but also admits that Alfie pulled the knife because she ignored his firm objection to her flirting. She didn’t believe Alfie to be violent before that incident. Judith also says she prefers to move around because people are either too preachy or too nosy about her work. She says Duncan was always talking to her about how evil men were. Geordie orders Judith to stay at the house until the investigation ends. Will realizes that Alfie pulled the knife because he’s scared of getting close to women after his girlfriends’ death.
Will returns to the church to once again pray for help for his feelings. Mikey interrupts him with a confession that he lied to him and the cops about his alibi. It turns out Mikey is dating three women from the college at the same time and he didn’t want the girls to find out. Will calls Geordie with this new information and Miss Scott jokes she’ll tell the girlfriends herself.
Take A Break
Mrs. C and Jack find Leonard scrubbing in the kitchen. They tell him that, in consideration of his future with the halfway house, they’re giving him a gift of vacation so he can de-stress. The offer even includes covering the cost of hotel rooms for the residents so they won’t be homeless. Leonard rejects their very kind offer, the same way Will refused to take help from his friends in the last episode. He doesn’t want to leave the house, or the residents.
Later on, Daniel and Leonard are sitting together discussing their situation. Daniel argues that the residents need some kind of structure and that it could have easily been Leonard who the suspect hurt. Leonard then insists that Daniel isn’t supporting his decision to help the less fortunate. Daniel claps back that he was the one who did all the day-to-day work in the cafe, he was the one who had to evade arrest and police questioning, and that the only real break from their tough lives was the one week in Morocco several years ago. The vacation offer is clearly a good idea after all of this stress!
Geordie also suggests a similar idea to Mrs. C and Jack to Will. Will is hammering all of his feelings into the nails on Ernie’s go-kart. Geordie says that he does understand Will’s feelings because of his own war experiences. Will says that Alfie’s death is divine retribution for his failures. Geordie counters that Will should open up to a friend that understands, and that he should also take a break from helping the halfway house. Will counters that the residents are all seeking redemption and it helps him to take his mind off his situation. Honestly, Will needs to take the vacation money if Leonard isn’t going to use it!
A Cover Story
At the police station, Mrs. Scott, Geordie, and Larry are combing through the police records of all the residents. Geordie finds out that Alfie worked in agriculture in Scotland during the war, which is how his immigration was sponsored. Duncan however does not have a police file, there or anywhere else. He does, however, have a connection to Scotland. Geordie returns to the boarding house to search his room. He finds a bus ticket to Perth. Duncan finds Geordie searching and confesses that he lied about being an ex-convict to get a bed. He claims he was homeless and needed a place to stay. Leonard tells Martha that his project to help others is falling apart. She responds by handing him a resignation letter and apologizes.
Geordie returns to the police station to discover Duncan’s real story. Geordie found that Duncan used to live in Scotland with a wife and a daughter. His daughter was Alfie’s ex-girlfriend Heather. Duncan and his wife blamed Alfie for their daughter’s suicide. Geordie returns to the house looking for Duncan but the residents claim he left. Martha is then revealed to be Duncan’s wife. It’s clear both of them lied about their past to gain access to Alfie at the halfway house.
Geordie then brings both Martha and Duncan into the police station for questioning. Both of them insist that because Alfie ran away after their daughter’s death, it proves his guilt, but it’s clear Alfie ran away because he was scared of their reactions. Martha claims Alfie was an evil foreigner who seduced their daughter. Will reveals he discovered the couple asked their local priest to marry. Duncan and Martha blocked the marriage which made Heather feel there was no way out. There’s a flashback to Alfie’s murder where we see Martha holding the object that causes Alfie’s head injury. They’re arguing about Heather. Martha claims that Geordie should feel sympathy for her because Esme is at the age where she can end up dating bad men. Geordie doesn’t buy it and arrests them for Alfie’s death. Will and Geordie then toast to their work redeeming them.
Unsent Letters
Will returns to the vicarage where he gets a call from Ernie. He reassures Ernie that, if the new baby arrives on his birthday, it will be a double celebration. He then sits down to try to write to Bonnie, but he ends up throwing out 3 drafts. Will’s voiceover mentions that he misses her and is struggling post-accident. Another version talks about not wanting the guilt to rot inside him. Will then takes what appears to be two of the pills Alfie gave him then goes back to the church to pray.
Does Will have the ability to ease his guilty conscience? When will Bonnie go into labor? Will Leonard keep the halfway house open? We’ll have to watch next week’s Grantchester to find out!
