“The Bible says let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgive one another as God in Christ forgave you. After what we’ve been through, I don’t know, but we have a responsibility, to ourselves and to our God, to try.”
And so the much heralded climax in itv’s acclaimed drama
series ‘Broadchurch’ turned out to be a word ... a sermon.
No dramatic last minute plot twist, despite the advance
hinting on twitter, but instead the surprising, shocking possibility that, in
the midst of the darkness, light can shine.
The series, set in a picturesque Dorset seaside town, lasted
8 weeks and was sandwiched between two harrowing scenes of grief, both
powerfully acted; a mother’s realisation of the loss of her son, a wife’s
recognition of the culpability of her husband.
Yet, despite the dark, difficult, harrowing subject matter, the
sheer scale and power of the sadness seemed to push out the normal feelings of finger
pointing and vengeance. It wasn’t that
there was no anger or bitterness, there was plenty, but through it all,
somehow, the overwhelming emotion was sympathy, for families, a community,
broken.
The real sense of ugliness came half way through the series
when a vigilante group rampaged through the town and drove an innocent man to
suicide. When, finally, the actual
perpetrator was revealed there was a sense of not wanting to give in to those
forces again.
And so the whole series concluded, in Church and on the
beach, with the most unexpected of twists, a community reborn, a flicker of
hope...
