BBC One
Having spectacularly failed to nail the Cornish accent Mary takes time out from Jamaica Inn to hook up with her God bothering friends vicar Francis Davey (Ben Daniels) and his freaky sister Hannah (Shirley Henderson). She tells Francis about Joss stringing up Abe and he’s a sympathetic ear. He’s working with the Feds to bring the smugglers to justice and wants her to go undercover as a stool pigeon snout snitch grass rat squealer. “Be our eyes and ears” he purrs apparently unaware that those are exactly the first things the sea scrotes will be taking when they rumble her.
Aunt Patience is still busy getting socked in the jaw, this time by Joss who she comforts afterwards because he cracked a knuckle on one of her teeth. He’s just mad because he’s received word from his mysterious overlord that he must do another smuggle – a bad one. Secret agent Mary follows him out on the moors but being a complete fuckwit she loses him in the fog. As she strolls aimlessly back through the woods she comes upon Jem and they chomp on some seriously shitty rabbit he’s just slaughtered and talk about his tough upbringing. “You’re a thief who stands for everything I despise” she says and he correctly takes this as a come-on. So on he comes.
Secret agent Mary follows him out on the moors but being a complete fuckwit she loses him in the fog.
Later Joss stumbles upon Undercover Mary going through his smuggle plans and it appears her long painful death is imminent but all he wants to do is have a girly chat and braid her hair. He tells her how he’s killed men with his bare hands – strangled them, drowned them, pulled their spine through their mouths, pushed them in front of a combine harvester, smothered them in honey then locked them in a trunk with a vat full of army ants – yes, all the killings. Worse than that he wrecks ships on PURPOSE for the booty. “I’m a monster aren’t I?” he says. Oh stop showing off.
When she gets snooty with him he drops the bomb that her sainted father was not killed by smugglers but was a smuggler himself. Hanged for it in fact. She doesn’t take it well. Being a complete fuckwit she doesn’t take anything well.
Still, she gets to go to Christmas market with Jem to flog a stolen horse together, her dressed as a man because she’s into that shit. In a real stroke of luck the wife of the magistrate he stole the horse from buys it back and 30 guineas the richer they head off to a B&B to fuck each other’s brains out. Just as Jem pops out to pay the landlord he gets apprehended by a magistrate and Mary has to finish herself off before doing a runner.
“To fear nothing and desire nothing – that’s what it is to be free” Hannah tells her in a rare moment of insight a while later and to get a lift back to the Inn she has to suffer the nausey vicar again. Spit roasted between Christianity and cock – she can barely stand the boredom. She tells him about the World-Class Wrecking Crew her uncle is running and he assures her it’s all under control. Quite soon Joss will be doing his ship wrecking from behind bars. When world’s worst undercover agent Mary tells him she grassed she gets a sock in the jaw as well. Just one episode to go and the tension is bearable.
The verdict: Wrecks in effect.
Marks out of 10: 6