Apple Tree Yard, episode 4 review: courtroom finale proved conventional to the core

[Dani ♡]

 

Any TV drama that starts with the breathless, heart-stopping promise of Apple Tree Yard (BBC One) carries an expectation that its end will be as good, if not better, than its beginning. I was hoping, following Sunday’s slightly pedestrian developments, that the finale might yet live up to the promise of its highly effective opening episode And it did, partly at least, by cranking up the courtroom-drama tension via a neatly devised succession of shocks before finishing off with a nasty little twist. But while it satisfied at the fundamental, thriller-plot level of wriggling and squirming and keeping us thoroughly gripped, it lacked something crucial. It had the sort of clear emotional conviction that blinds you to just how much you’re being mani[CENSORED]ted by a knowing script and great acting. Denise Gough as DS Johns Denise Gough as DS Johns CREDIT: BBC As we headed into the final straight, Dr Yvonne Carmichael (Emily Watson), had at last figured out – a good hour after the rest of us – that her lover Mark Costley (Ben Chaplin) was not the spook she had assumed him to be. As she sat in the dock, accused of murder, we looked on as a procession of women were horribly humiliated in court. A policewoman colleague of Costley’s was torn apart for concealing that she had had momentary, if unwelcome, “intimate contact” with him. A lamb-like expert witness, who argued that Costley was suffering from a high-functioning personality disorder, was ritually slaughtered by the prosecution. So, by the time it came for Carmichael to give her own decidedly compromised evidence, it seemed inevitable that the same fate awaited her. The shock came in that she was attacked not by the prosecution, but by Costley’s defence. And with information about their affair that could only have come from him. The betrayal was meticulously built up and, as such, was wrenching. This was not least because, as we were constantly reminded, Carmichael was the first and foremost victim here. Ben Chaplin as Costley Ben Chaplin as Costley CREDIT: BBC Yet there remained a sense that it was a tad too calculated. In the end, justice of a kind was served and Carmichael was spared the worst. But as was made very clear, she was condemned in other ways and forced to serve out a sentence of an alternative kind within her own marriage. This drama that started out by offering what seemed like a genuinely different and imaginatively challenging take on the age-old trope of an adulterous affair gone wrong finished on a disappointingly conventional note.