This is Beth’s 23rd birthday. In the next 24 hours, she will try to escape from her troubled Protestant stepfather Billy and escape with her mysterious Catholic lover Liam. We were in the 19th century Ireland, in County Fermanagh, the boring country of Ulster, at the BBC’s latest episode “Death and Nightingales” The first episode is coming, it is difficult to get rid of the impending sense of bad luck.
“The heartache of this place,” Beth said, strolling through the unruly fields around her stepfather’s manor. “Like it, hate it like there is no place in the world. Tomorrow, I will leave it forever.”
Between the unique and distant familiarity of the theme of the program and the time we are dealing with here, there is no circumvention of the fact that this is a painful period fragment. This was in July 1885, and in the opening sequence of the show, we reminded Ireland that it is still “an inseparable province of the British Empire.” According to Eugene McCabe’s novel of the same name, political turmoil and social unrest (quite disgustingly) are at the heart of the three-part series. Consider the contemporary TV fans who soak the toes in these ominous, braised waters – ready. I admit, I took a few minutes to adjust.
We soon discovered that her parents heard the quarrel between her parents when they were young, and Beth (Ann Skelly’s outstanding performance) found that Billy (Matthew Rhys from The Americans and The Post) was her stepfather. Not her creature. “I should listen to my father’s opinion: ‘Marry a belief in yourself, not some treacherous monks in Rome,'” he told Beth’s mother, Valene Kane, a Catholic woman, who married. I don’t know if she is pregnant.
When Beth was only 12 years old, Catherine died. Since then, she had to deal with Billy. Billy was uneasy about the lost wife and felt uneasy to transfer to Beth. In a particularly disturbing scene, Billy asked why Beth was so sour on his birthday that she replied that he knew why. She said in detail: “The last time you came in, I sat on my bed, kissed me – not my father – and then said something I would rather not repeat…” Just like the father and his stepdaughter are not suitable. The same uncomfortable theme of relationship is assertion as one of the defining powers of the story.
This is very complicated. Billy and Beth were bound by their love and loss of Catherine. Beth seems to rely a little on him and his suspicious wealth; the lingering memories of the threat of inheritance rights play a role in our minds as much as possible. When we first saw Beth, she fantasized about how to poison him, and her narrative often hinted at asking him to pay for his mother’s abuse. But there is also a confusing, contradictory and contrasting feeling. After all, he is a parent who has raised her for more than a decade. Beth was embarrassed about the internal struggle of how she felt her transit stepfather was throughout the narrative.
When she met Lift (Fifty Shades and The Fall’s Jamie Dornan), there was little relief. He is a man full of charm and mystery, and his intentions in Fermana and Beth are still unclear. He is a Catholic (as Beth said, she immediately feels farther away from her mother, keeping distance from her stepfather, I like to do this), and Beth quickly falls for him. Liam arrived in the already troubled environment of the Beth family, a catalyst for the turbulence that is about to occur on the other side of the 24-hour window, where death and nightingales will be positioned.
Beth and Billy and Liam found that their relationship had a sinister bottom line. On a tight day, we saw her rationalizing her desperate struggle to get rid of her difficult stepfather’s freedom. In the context of decades of secrets, mistrust and broader threats outside the land owned by Billy, the decision to flee with Liam feels like the smaller of the two emotional demons. Although this novel is considered by many to be a classic, it is safe to say that watching a young woman pushes these resolutions to the most comfortable viewing.