"PAULA", BBC2...new, dark thriller

[ThaliaLuxurySpa]

Trailer: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0530xzt

Anyone else watching tonight?

(Ireland apparently gets Wednesday episodes instead.
No spoilers, please!).

Yes, yes. Just like The Replacement. How can the BBC do so many things so well and then churn this out?

It's another Eh? What? series where at the end I find that I no longer care about any of the characters.

I'm definitely up for thought-provoking programmes, you can leave a couple of mysteries in the air but you can also jolly well tie a story up less ambiguously then that!

Well, well well.
Maybe I'm a psycho.

Killing the brother was just finishing a job that needed finishing. It was James who caused the death, Paula just tidied up.

The storyline about the boy and little sister left locked up till the sister died, is similar to Goodnight Mr. Tom.

They've both had unhealthy childhoods and meeting one another has led to them fulfilling psychopathic fantasies. For James it was meeting her which sent him on his killing spree, for Paula it was the need for revenge that drove her to fulfill her own fantasy of imprisoning somebody.

If they had never met each other then they may have continued with questionable morales, James with his 2 girlfriends living together, and Paula with her attitude to having sex with married men. To be fair she tried to end it unlike the other teacher who was actually married but over the course of the series that could be more likely to be due to her relationships being brief encounters on her terms. She says that she can't feel anything but once she has James locked up in her basement she has her lights on, is dressed in a different style and seems happier.

James has possibly had anger problems because of his realisation that his sister did die, and it is intertwined with the need to protect those close to him. He feels a connection to Paula and makes irrational decisions based on bitterness and jealousy. He blackmailed the teacher because he was jealous but he never set out to murder him and was actually shouting something totally unconnected to the teacher when he was bashing his head in. Calling was left ambiguous, could have been seen as a partner, or a dead weight on Paula so he was helping, or could have been an accident by the brother. Morgan was locked up by Crystal after he left as when Mac visits she says she hasn't seen him in 2 days which is when he stormed out after seeing Mary in the corner.

I don't get the bit when he had a balaclava on in the toilets though. So he wanted to harm her? But when he turns up at the basement he wants to have sex with her?

• Will forever distrust any BBC dramas with lead character named Paula.

• Would love to see Denise Gough in her live stage performances, though; she was mesmerising.

• Poor abandoned dog couldn't have been more clunkily introduced as a plot device, could it?

Writer: "Hmm...if only there was some subtle way for Paula to access doping drugs, whilst simultaneously show she does in fact have capacity to nurture and form attachments... Aha!"

Must admit, when she ushered the just-happened-to-be-attacked-outside-her-house-before-disappearing-into-thin-air mystery youth back to hers for 1st Aid, I assumed he'd end up yet another conquest.

• Do we believe Paula is actually pregnant, or that it's a convenient lie to gain emotional leverage with Mac? (Sinister to think what influence her regular contact with his young daughters would have, let alone sole upbringing of a baby).

• Maddening that the Crystal/ Morgan situation remains so unclear.

• Scene between Paula and her Father which perfectly summed up her family's odd dynamic: she watching tv news report about the shooting incident, goes to him for comfort, he doesn't know what to say, or how to hug her back, and tentatively pats her before immediately chiding her for keeping her Mother waiting and running late for Callum's hospital Dr.

I thought he had a knife in his hand when he came to the cellar, before she injected him.
Also thought that the police mentioned that there had been ?3 bodies found in the quarry recently. So maybe he had killed others.
However, am pretty sure forensic would see a difference between hammer injuries to the head and falls on rocks in real life.

What this needed was the last episode to be spread over two so that more of the questions could be answered.

The dog was ridiculous. I don't understand the point of it at all (other than to lure Paula down into the cellar and get the animal sedative from the vet. Why did she take it to the vet?)

Sorry James had a knife in his hand.

I guess there would have been hammer injuries and rock injuries though. Was it a hammer? I can't remember but I thought it was something he'd grabbed from the floor so maybe a brick.

Though you've got to sort of admire a woman who can single-handedly construct a 'living tomb' torture contraption and bury it underground, install victim inside, and remove all evidence of having done so, before the builders rock up next morning.

And to think we Brookside fans thought Trevor Jordache under the patio was melodramatic back in 1993.

Am completely confused as to what significance kept being underlined by all the repetition of captivity: was the take-home message something meaningful about being hostage to our subconscious? Imprisoned by our desires?

• Childhood experimenting with ropes/ knots/ captive games etc.

• Punishment by being locked in confined spaces.

• Adult BDSM

Seems a bit dubious, linking Paula and Callum's regular childhood experimentation, to that one accidental (non-fatal) strangulation, to Paula's consensual adult bondage with every adult sexual partner ("gets me in trouble, Mac"), to Crystal locking Morgan, bound and gagged, into a cupboard...

Pretty sure James's account to Mac of how Mary died was far from the truth.
(As Morgan contradicted what he'd said).
Perhaps lifestories exchanged in bed by Paula and James, were woven into each other's and Mac heard similarities from both?

Didn't explain why Mary's lips were stitched together.
Or did we call it right, upthread, that it was symbolic: she could never "speak the truth"?

Being kept challenged by some ambiguity's one thing, but...

I'm very sorry, I said Conor McPherson wouldn't disappoint, he did.

Personally I think Paula was unhinged because of her daily 6 hour round commute. Her house is in Belfast, the school is in Dublin.

about the commute!

Nelly,

TBF, I enjoyed certain elements and thought the first episode was great: liked the edginess, liked the feeling that it was all happening slightly between sleep and waking states, liked being uncertain as to whether it was more "psychological" or "supernatural" crime drama...

Then it all went mad (and I wasn't drinking gin last night; maybe that helped eps 1 and 2 make more sense?).

I think Mary's lips were stitched to show that she knew a secret she couldn't tell. That would be about how James killed her.

I don't get the bit when he had a balaclava on in the toilets though. So he wanted to harm her? But when he turns up at the basement he wants to have sex with her?
He was out because 'some woman turned up and paid surety for him' - that would have been Paula, as Morgan and Crystal wouldn't have the money. So having got him out, he would think she was interested in him as a lover.

James just blackmailed Byrden (?) for the money - he was desperate for cash. He was jealous, too. And he was expressing his anger for the landlord when he beat the PE teacher to death.

I'm watching it now, am totally lost so I'll read back after and hope you can ask explain it to me!!

I didn't get any of that

Could someone explain please- like you're dealing with a small child

I got lost from the bit where the police were interviewing the neighbour and talking about the child missing.

Just watched the final one on line. Bloody hell what........

just before Paula realised that James was in the basement we saw a poo on the floor [poop] and then later when James was in the box she told him that his waste would fall out the other end. Does that mean that somebody else was in another box, or was it the dog's poo?

I am slightly reminded of Sarah Water's The Little Stranger where a succession of bad inexplicable ghostly type fires/deaths/accidents happen around the protagonist and in the end the malevolent force or presence is borne out of the protagonist's own existence iyswim.

Well that was as clear as mud. What was the dog all about? So Paula could practise her doping?

Why did she kill Callum?

What was the point of the teacher's death?