Cracker: Brotherly Love

Brotherly Love 
Air dates: 10/22, 10/23 and 10/29/94
Written: Jimmy McGovern  
Directed: Roy Battersby

Brotherly Love marked Jimmy McGovern's final script for Cracker. (I may or may not bother with 2006's abysmal 9/11 special.) Like Men Should Weep, it's overstuffed with plot strands, character resolutions and thematic baggage, resulting in a clunky serial. Yet for all its awkward craftsmanship, Love wins on sheer emotional power.

David Harvey (Mark Lambert) is an uptight Catholic who visits prostitutes behind wife Maggie's (Brid Brennan) back. He becomes the chief suspect when one prostitute winds up murdered. Fitz meanwhile deals with his mother's death, his straight-laced brother Danny (Clive Russell), and Judith's pregnancy - noting that the priest overseeing the funeral (David Calder) is Harvey's brother. He also keeps an eye on Jimmy Beck, just returned after a lengthy nervous breakdown. Beck immediately clashes with Jane Penhaligon, more convinced than ever that Beck raped her.

There's no getting around Brotherly Love's big weakness: the murder plot isn't very interesting. McGovern successfully attains misdirection by shuffling the chief suspect(s) between acts, along with contrasting a family loyal enough to cover up for murders with Fitz's fractured homelife. But the Harveys aren't especially well-drawn. Brid Brennan proves suitably ferocious as Maggie's psychoses boil to the surface but she's still basically a nutcase. More interesting, just, are the prostitutes themselves, an interesting cross section of "fallen women" - especially Polly Hemmingway's crude madam. As a whodunnit Brotherly Love is satisfactory, at best.

Nor are McGovern's jabs at Catholicism especially enlightening. The Big Crunch at least had an interesting idea: a sect functioning as an extension of its leader's ego. Brotherly Love contents itself with rude sarcasm, using Fitz as a mouthpiece for facile rants about religion. As if subverting I Confess, McGovern treats Father Michael as a hypocrite for upholding the confessional seal; Danny's uprightness led to a failed marriage. Beck himself is Irish. Love suggests one can't be a Catholic without being a repressed lunatic.

At least Love ties this into its most interesting strand. Masculine insecurity is one of Cracker's recurring fascinations, and even more than Men Should Weep this show hones in on misogyny. David Harvey proves twisted in a more mundane way than most Cracker protagonists. With a pronounced Madonna-whore complex, he forces hookers to dress up as little girls while treating his wife as a chaste saint. By focusing on prostitution, McGovern ponders what's wrong with a society that makes females commodities. Even Maggie gets a sympathetic moment; her family's starving yet David spends much-needed money on hookers? Women become things to be used, discarded and killed.

This leads nicely to Jimmy Beck. As Fitz slowly peels back Beck's defenses, we get a disturbing picture that goes beyond guilt. Mocked by girls as a teenager, sexually insecure, Beck loathes women to a disturbing degree. He even tells Fitz that "everybody rapes," recounting unsavory youthful escapades and gloating that he can identify Penhaligon by an intimate tattoo. Until now, Beck's wrapped his misogyny into a masculine mad-at-the-world persona. By holding him responsible for Bilborough's death, Penhaligon was just another woman who "betrayed" Beck. Yet his action cause endless shame; now Beck's no better than the criminals he's spent his life fighting.

Of everything great in Cracker, Beck might be McGovern's finest achievement. We sense, even at this stage, he's a good man who went tragically wrong somewhere along the line. He regains a modicum of respect by busting Maggie Harvey at show's end. His tragedy was never being smart or self-aware enough to recognize his flaws. One telling bit during has Beck take a moment to conjure the word "irony," then smugly repeating it like a pleased child. Lorcan Cranitch never loses sight of Beck's humanity, giving an incredibly powerful performance.

Our sympathy for this devil dissipates whenever Penhaligon's around. Geraldine Somerville's dour, nasty turn shows how deeply she's been traumatized. Gone is the playful, flirty Panhandle; now she wears drab clothes, puts her hair up, speaks in terse, cruel jabs. When she's not promising to expose Beck she ponders letting a disturbed hobo kill him. Her rift with Fitz, absent for the past four months, grows insurmountable; that Fitz's wife gives her one of the coldest insults imaginable certainly doesn't help. She can't even dive into work with Beck around, and another sex killer to investigate.

Fitz has the Herculean task of juggling all these stories. Robbie Coltrane shows him understandably overwhelmed; he's no sharper at nailing the killer than the cops, and fingers Father Michael largely, it seems, due to misplaced guilt over his mother. He's more interested getting Beck to confess, even driving the man into a panic attack. Nor is he happy with the arrival of Danny, a prig who self-righteously mocks Fitz. Judith's pregnancy offers him a brief hope of redemption; he even promises to swear off gambling! Fitz is at his lowest point since One Day a Lemming Will Fly. Here, at least, he's got an excuse.

Like its predecessor, Love is an exceedingly dark show. Roy Battersby's atmospheric direction dwells on grungy slums, cheap tenements and closed factories, swarming with prostitutes, vagrants and criminals. How the cops discover the third victim provides a nasty touch out of Hitchcock or Val Lewton. This show has a few glimmers of comedy, namely Penhaligon's prostitute getup (a Pittsburgh Steelers jacket!) and the bingo game that breaks out during the funeral. This bathos provides scant relief from the sordid story.

Brotherly Love seems to wrap up tidily: Judith gives birth to Fitz's new son, Danny buggers off, the killer is behind bars (we think). But Jimmy Beck still must kick start the final act. The last ten minutes show Beck taking David Harvey hostage, mocking Wise and pleading Penhaligion for forgiveness before taking a swan dive off a hotel roof. The last shot of Penhaligon, shrieking inconsolably in Fitz's arms, is among the most powerful, gut-wrenching finales you'll encounter in all television.

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Brotherly Love ends on such a devastating note that it would have been a perfect finale. Sadly, we've two (or four) installments to go. We'll wrap those up as quickly as possible.