Hard Sun, episode six recap: a fruit basket of implausibility, but a gob-stopping denouement
Neil Cross’s Hard Sun (BBC One) has been the bonkers Saturday-night treat that kept on giving. A fruit basket of implausibility, it has spilled over with serial killers, crooked coppers and nefarious MI5 spooks, with Agyness Deyn and Jim Sturgess in the middle of the maelstrom as amoral detectives training laser-sights on each other. Now it was on to the final episode. Could Cross deliver a denouement worthy of the wackiness that went before?
“They lied to me… it’s already here,” gasped ruthless MI5 operative Morrigan (Nikki Amuka-Bird) in the closing scene as the London skyline lit up in the shadow of a giant satsuma with skin half undone. The dodgy fruit was, of course, our dear old sun – peeling in slow motion and soon to obliterate all before it.
Along with wiping out civilisation, the Spice Girls reunion, all those Star Wars sequels etc, the coming conflagration would soon obscure the multitudes of plot holes riddling the BBC’s ambitious but flawed thriller.
And yet, for all the silliness, with its dying gasps the series achieved a bonkers majesty of a kind. There’s no point holding back if you are going to cobble together random bits of The Departed, True Detective, Life on Mars and Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. So you have to credit Cross for lunging in, studs in the air, come what may. Here are the talking points.
Has Hard Sun set for the final time?
Morrigan fled custody after Hicks (Sturgess) and Renko (Deyn) fitted her up for the murder of Hick’s corrupt partner, Butler. But while she had been able to slip free of her old MI5 chums – now set on eliminating her on the basis that she was an untrustworthy loose end – she hadn’t counted on the doggedness of the two detectives with whom she had played a game of cat and mouse through the season.
Their plan was simple. Remove Morrigan from the picture and the Butler investigation would be closed, the remaining MI5 attack dogs (presumably) called off. A future of petals and roses would await Hicks and Renko – at least until the “Hard Sun” conspiracy they’d stumbled upon came to pass and the world ended in five years. But, come on, that was ages away.
Because they weren’t completely heartless Hicks assured Morrigan that he would see to it that her family was looked after – and not in the bullet-to-the-base-of-the-neck fashion that has been the show’s default solution to sticky situations.
But Renko and Hicks were still a BIT heartless, as became obvious as, having cornered Morrigan on a building site, they raised their weapons and prepared to pull the trigger. As coincidence would have it the sun had commenced rising – and was revealed to be a whacking great supernova.
This was literally a case of apocalypse now. “Hard Sun” wasn’t half a decade away – it was happening right here, today, before they’d even squeezed in breakfast. A tear trickled down Renko’s face; shortly afterwards the screen cut to black.
Why hadn’t Hicks and Renko worked together all along?
Understanding that their true enemy was Morrigan, the misanthropic cops were joining forces. They’d been at each other’s throats much of the previous five episodes but, with the clock ticking, had finally seen sense. Better late then never – or was it?
The finale began with a raid on Morrigan’s house to plant the gun with which Hicks had killed Butler a year previously. Renko was almost rumbled when Morrigan’s husband popped down stairs for a sneaky late-hours glass of water – but, no, that glimmering that caught his eye was a fox in the backyard, not Renko done up like a fancy-dress ninja tucked under the breakfast bar.
Let’s talk about the pointless but fun subplot
Because he didn’t want to force us to sit through an entire hour of Renko and Hicks thinking about ways to out-manoeuvre Morrigan, Cross also wedged in a pulpy subplot about a serial lobotomist. This was probably the best part of the episode – if also the most ludicrous (the two frequently go together on Hard Sun).
A woman sat in a car, gazing at a river, a suicide note freshly written and on the dash-board. From the reeds emerged a shaven-headed figure dressed like Agent 47 from the Hitman games (Anthony Carrigan). He was a Nazi-Pagan sun worshiper on a mission to free the suicidal from their destructive urges by taking a hammer and nails to their frontal lobes.
All capacity for free thought extinguished, their demons neutered, Mr Vice’s “patients” would be at liberty to roam his spooky cultist mansion to their hearts’s content. Everyone was a winner. A whiff of True Detective season one hung about the setting, which was steeped in Lovecraftian existential horror (the mad-man’s car was registered to a Herbert West, named after the HP Lovecraft character).
Was George the best character all along?
We had learned all of this because quiet George from work (Adrian Rawlins) was a frequenter of suicide message boards. He was familiar with Vice and his unique services and so slipped away to take care of the situation on his own.
Though fully-occupied trying to stitch up Morrigan, having persuaded DCS Bell (Derek Riddell) to swoop on her, Hicks and Renko nonetheless had time to dash after George. They followed him with the hidden tracker Renko had stashed in the each of the vehicles of her fellow officers – a big reveal went down well at the office.
George’s plan was to secretly tape Vice and then… well, we’ll never know. He was bundled into a car by the sociopath and snapped awake to find himself strapped to a chair with a nail pointed at his cranium. In burst Hicks and Renko having discovered the other missing “suicides” wandering about drooling in the corridor. Rather than follow through with George, Vice short-wired his own brain with a nail to the eyeball and was last seen on the ground with an insane, Joker-style smile.
Of course Morrigan was going to figure a way out of the situation.
Morrrigan was a dead woman walking. Hicks and Renko were putting it about that their nemesis was selling top level MI5 info to the highest bidder. Meaning her former colleagues – including that scary lady with the wooly hat – would have no option but eliminate her.
Morrigan had other ideas and, tapping out a Morse code on the interrogation room table, drew the attention Bell – still keen on pinning the Butler killing on Hicks. Her plan was, of course, completely implausible. But we’re six weeks into this realm of sheer bonkerdom now. It’s a bit late to starting complaining.
With the underlings dismissed, Morrigan set her cards out. Unless Bell got her to a safe house she was a goner. In return for secure passage Morrigan promised to prove conclusively that Hicks had pulled the trigger on Butler. She would serve up Renko’s head on a plate too. Presumably she meant that in the metaphorical sense – though, this being a Neil Cross thriller, you can’t be sure.
Hicks personal life wasn’t going so well
Cultists, spooks, end of the world via solar supernova… it was turning into a real rotter of a day for Hicks. As if all of that wasn’t enough, his lover Mari (also Butler’s widow) was being lead to believe Hicks has deceived her. Bell had popped around to explain, a bit mysteriously, that an outside party was being charged with her husband’s murder – implying Hicks was lying when he told Mari (Aisling Bea) that he’d killed Butler.
Wracked with guilt over their affair, she spilled the icky details to Hicks’s wife (Lorraine Burroughs). All of this Hicks learned in a phone-call with his step-daughter, who promptly disowned him. Shortly afterwards he found out that humanity was about to be boiled alive. No wonder that, by the end, he looked fully miffed.
Deathly Dull Daniel was almost completely absent – hurrah!
The best episode of the series was also the one that relegated Renko’s delinquent son (Jojo Macari) into the background. This was not a coincidence as he’d brought an overdone, Ken Loach-esque social realism that jarred with the sci-fi camp. It was, in truth, a bit far-fetched that Renko and Hicks could, with a figurative finger-click, scrub the murder charges against Daniel for the killing of his rapist father. On the other hand, we were spared all those overacted scenes with his mother – so let’s not complain.
Was Hard Sun worth the commitment?
Barking from the outset, Hard Sun will have tested the patience of anyone expecting their weekend drama to contain at least trace elements of plausibility.
But it never wavered in its silliness and Cross would presumably argue that all the machinations were justified by the visually impressive climax in which Renko, Morrigan and Hicks stared at that huge, grotesque corona.
And he’d have have a point. Viewers who kept faith were surely glad they hung in all the way to that gob-stopping denouement. It was a slog at times but you won us over in the end, Hard Sun.
