'Broadchurch' recap: Episode 6

It’s another dark day in the lovely seaside town of Broadchurch. (But the weather is fine, as always.)

This episode once again focuses on trials, but not just the one in the courtroom. Mark and Beth Latimer’s marriage, already hanging by a thread, is rocked yet again. First, when Ellie and Joe’s son Tom takes the stands and Tom admits that he and Mark have been meeting in Susan Wright’s trailer to play video games.

“I just wanted to be close to Danny,” Mark tearfully admits to Beth when she asks him why, and Beth seems to understand. They hug, and you can’t help but get excited. Can they fully reconcile at last, and be on the same team? Please? Don’t hold your breath. We’ll return to them in a moment.

Back to Tom on the stand, who just can’t help himself. He lies under oath for his child-killing dad, saying that Mark was instead the one to blame for Danny’s death—that he’d said so himself. Poor Mark! Of course he’s not guilty of killing his son. He’s left with no choice but to also take the stand and defend himself.

Outside of the courtroom, we find Alec Hardy and his wife having a chat, where DI Hardy casually tells her he’s going to the hospital the next day to get a pacemaker put in. Okay then! If this takes care of the side story that Hardy is in poor health, then thank the good lord. It’s an unnecessary distraction that does nothing for this series! Let’s just concentrate on busting the murderers, people.

Back in the courtroom, we find Mark Latimer on the stands. Sharon, the prosecuting lawyer, is doing her usual mean pitbull thing, yelling at him and accusing him of killing his own son. Once again—poor Mark! But we do finally find out what happened during that missing hour of time, between his boning Becca Fisher and going home to Beth.

He was writing a letter to Beth, telling her that their marriage was over. That he’d met someone else. Beth runs out of the courtroom, and screams in the stairwell. Okay, forget about Mark. Poor Beth! She’s the one who really can’t catch a break here.

Afterward, Beth and Mark have it out. She asks him, “How is this a marriage? Why are we together?” She says if it’s only because of Danny’s death, not to bother—she doesn’t need him. Come on guys, can’t you just reconcile and be back in love already? You’ve gone through so much. Is it too much to ask that we, the audience, get a glimmer of hope that things will be okay between you? (Doubtful. Like I said, it was a dark day in Broadchurch.)

Back in the courtroom, Ellie finally loses her shit on her son Tom, screaming at him in front of everyone for lying under oath, saying that Joe is a murderer and a shit and that Tom is finally coming home to live with her again. “Yes, mum,” he says meekly, and you know he’s relieved. And she’s relieved. At last, something positive!

Meanwhile, Claire and Lee Ashworth are behaving strangely, per usual. Claire goes to visit him in his house. (Is he just squatting in an abandoned stone home upon a hill? Can someone explain this to me? Also, WHY is he always just standing on the hill gazing out? Like everyday, all day?) And they fight. He starts to pull her hair and strangle her, so naturally they have sex up against the stone wall. It looked uncomfortable.

OH! Hardy’s pacemaker operation went well. He texted Ellie to tell her, and she goes to his hospital to chew him out for telling her about it via text. I love their friendship. The sarcastic mum and the curmudgeon. It’s clearly what makes this show such a success.

I digress. Priest Paul goes to visit Joe and tells him he can’t visit him anymore. That he’s a guilty murderer and he’s done with their friendship. Good! I finally like and trust Paul!

Over at lawyer Jocelyn’s house, she finally admits to her partner Ben that she’s going blind. “The body lets down the mind, the mind lets down the body. It happens to us all,” she simply says, shrugging off this devastating fact about life. It gives you pause. It DOES happen to us all. And that sucks. Anyway, they’re all super happy that she finally told the truth and enjoy heaping piles of spaghetti and smile about it all.

Back at Claire Ashworths, Ellie is having her hair done by Claire. (I don’t want to be mean, but her new hairstyle ended up looking JUST like her usual one—not sure Claire is that great at her job.) Ellie is flipping through Claire’s hair portfolio when she sees a pic of Claire wearing—wait for it—the heart pendant that belonged to Pippa Gillespie, the dead girl from the Sandbrook case.

WHAT. I mean, if your husband DID kill a young girl and you knew about it and had her pendant, which was stolen from a cop car when it was bagged evidence, why on earth would you EVER WEAR IT? This is one stupid move, lady. Ellie notices, and Claire notices that she notices. Uh oh. Is Claire the guilty one here? I mean she lies all the time, she’s clearly covering something up, and she wears a dead girl’s pendant. Is she the Sandbrook murderer?

The episode closes with a montage of sorts, where we glimpse what the main players are up to. Ellie and Tom are painting their house (yay! moving forward!), Beth is cuddling her baby and glares at Mark (boo, not moving forward), Sharon is crying while looking at baby pictures of her now incarcerated son (okay, so the wench has a heart and feelings), and Claire burns the photograph of herself wearing the pendant.

Oh, and guess where Lee is. That’s right! STANDING ON THE HILL. LOOKING OUT. THAT DAMN HILL!

The final scene is a flashback to when the cop car was broken into, and the heart pendant stolen. We see who did it. Yep. It was Claire. Did Lee make her do it? Or Ricky Gillespie? Or is she just a stone cold killer? We’ll tune in next week to find out.