'Happy Valley' Sees Catherine Running Headlong Into an Overdue Confrontation

In this week’s Happy Valley, the walls seem to be closing in. Like the other seasons, our perennially pissed-off protagonist Sergeant Catherine Cawood is kept mainly in the dark about the central crime storyline going on; her problems are more personal as the tension mounts up regarding “our Ryan” and his illicit, extended contact with his imprisoned father, Tommy Lee Royce. Last week ended with the promise of a bombshell, and episode 2 wastes no time dropping it — Clare and Neil have been accompanying Ryan’s visits to see his dad. It’s a devastating betrayal for Catherine; she can’t find the words to confront her sister until the end of the episode.

Until then, Ryan’s got other stuff to worry about. Coach Rob Hepworth singles him out for embarrassing him the day prior, resulting in an outburst that gets Ryan kicked off the football team. It’s infuriating to see a grown man demean and humiliate a kid with behavioral issues, and heartbreaking when Ryan storms home to throw a tantrum where he smashes up his room. Clare eventually gets him calm, but the sweetness in their relationship is undermined by the intel Catherine got at the top of the episode. Catherine’s particularly sensitive to her family members turning/being turned against her, and the distress dwells on her every time we see her face.

In our main crime plotline, Joanna Hepworth is accosting Faisal to help her daughters escape her abusive husband. She seems to think he’s promised to buy her a flat, but the very squirrelly and stressed pharmacist is at a loose end — his money is all tied up in the pharmacy owned by his wife Anisha’s dad. On top of the money he has to regularly pay to gangsters, cash is tight, and Joanna is starting to look like a big problem for Faisal…