Irreplaceable

Well, that was…something.

I glanced at my watch at five to ten on Tuesday night, approximately 55 minutes into the final hour of ‘The Replacement’, and found myself wondering how the hell they were going to tie up the tangled mess of loose ends that was lying around all over the place in the remaining five minutes. The answer was, very quickly indeed.

It seemed for a while that Paula (Vicky McClure) had not only won the psychological battle she had waged with her erstwhile superior, Ellen (Morven Christie), but also the physical struggle as she drugged and imprisoned her after stealing her child. Paula had successfully networked her way into just about every aspect of Ellen’s life but her story was now beginning to unravel as she was exposed as being a little unhinged. In fairness, in real life, most co-workers would have taken one look at those eyes and made a mental note of where the company baseball bat was kept, so why David, her boss and Ian, Ellen’s psychiatrist husband, afforded her so much credibility is beyond me. The fact that they’re both men, allied to the amount of shapely leg on show at all times, explained their blindness to all things ‘loopy’ on the Paula front I suppose. They should have taken a harder look at her husband Kieran (Navin Chowdhry), who permanently wore the expression of a recently neutered bloodhound, if they wanted an insight into day-to-day living with Ms Reece, he looked about as content as the cellmate who had just trodden on ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser’s airfix model but despite, or maybe because of this, he seemed unwilling to share Ellen’s suspicions that his wife was capable of murder. Sustained crockery smashing? Yes. Murder? No. Well, not on a Tuesday.

The last half an hour suddenly started to get a little congested with plot twists. Ian’s Mum, Ellen’s mother-in-law (keep up), who had been a somewhat peripheral and hostile figure until now, suddenly professed to be all over Paula’s neurosis and offered to use her psychiatric powers to drive a stake through her heart as she slept in her coffin. David did a swift about-turn on his professional opinion of Paula’s credibility after he noticed that she failed to cast a shadow, and Kieran simply ran away as fast as he could, throwing his wedding ring over his shoulder and screaming that she could keep the house and the car.   

So, with about eight minutes of the series left, the beleaguered Ellen still had to wake from a drug induced coma, smash her way out of a locked car, locate her kidnapped child and convince the authorities that her recent restraining order was all an administrative cock-up. Blimey, throw in a bomb tied to the engine of a speeding school bus with no brakes and you might give her something to worry about. Those RIBA exams must have been a doddle.

As expected, all roads led back to the building that Ellen had originally designed and the Benny Hill chase sequence ended up back in the most suspicious library outside a Cluedo box. The real pity about this series was that, as good and as watchable as it was, as well written and well acted as it was, as gripping and as tense as it was, it ended with a uniformed policeman slapping handcuffs on the villain at the scene of the crime in as tired and as clichéd a conclusion as any two-bob cop drama could produce.

It wasn’t quite the end. We still had to have a little montage of Ellen, fully bonded with her immaculately behaved child, judging the final of the world ‘humble-pie’ eating contest as one character after another paraded before her with huge gobfulls of the stuff, offering her jobs and complimenting her on her maternal genius. Only Ian, her now estranged spouse, got the bum’s rush as he was politely told to ‘do one’ at the door. Serves him right, too. After all, if he’s going to take the word of a goggle-eyed, power dressing, vampiress over that of the devoted, if emotionally charged, mother of his firstborn, he isn’t much of a husband, and much less of a highly paid shrink.