Surely the jolly haymaking expedition at the start of this episode will be disrupted by marauders? Not in the way we expect... Re-enter Anne Tranter from episode 2. I love the awkwardness of the bit where she and Greg meet in the kitchen.
A really tense episode where we're constantly wondering exactly what form Vic's 'Revenge' will take. We're led to believe that it's shaming Anne at the supper table, but then there's an intense final sequence where he drags himself inch by inch upstairs to confront her. That confrontation is very strange, it cycles through him coming to kill her, her prepared to kill him, him begging her to do so, and then them both affirming in paraphrase what Abby says to the dying Angel in episode 5, 'God is survival.' And then they spend the night together.
I haven't made up my mind yet how I feel about that final sequence, I can't decide it if it was really powerful, really twisted, or really ridiculous.
Dating update: we're explicitly told that Greg last saw Anne [just before the end of ep 2] 6 months ago. Haymaking takes place between June and September apparently, and the previous episode (qv) is between June 15-July 27. Laura is said to have the baby blues (offscreen) so it may only be 5 days since she gave birth, so the date must be about Jun 20-Aug 1.
At face value that contradicts the dating in ep 2. I always assume 'n months' means 'plus or minus 2 weeks' so this would mean ep 2 can't have been earlier than early December, and may have been as late as mid-January. We previously established that the extreme latest date for ep 1 is Mon Dec 1, so that could fit, but anything later requires us to intersperse months of extra time into eps 2 and 3. To fit the most plausible date - Mon Oct 27 - we have to space out eps 2 and 3 with 5 weeks of unseen action. Yes, Tom Price needs more time to go to London and back than the other evidence allows, but that's the only support that this '6 months' thing has. All the other evidence is against it.
Vic also says that he was alone in the quarry for 4 months: we saw that ep 8 was Mar 15-31, and that puts ep 2 at Nov 15-30, and that sustains our ongoing assumption about ep 1 being late Oct/early Nov. (He says '3 or 4 months' in ep 8, but he's more definite here).
Btw, I always assumed haymaking was something you did after you harvested wheat. But it's a totally different process, you perform it on fields of grass, and you do it before the wheat harvest anyway.
And if I hadn't been hoping I could prove Terry Nation wrong, I'd never have looked it up and found that out. Who'd have thought that Terry would still be teaching me things in 2020?
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