Heartstones: Part One

Sixteen-year-old Elvira's mother is dead, and grief has arranged the family in strange formations. Elvira is sad, as anyone would be, but not as sad as her younger sister Spinny. Spinny worries their father Luke will be heartbroken, which is where Elvira knows better: Luke has her, after all, and she is ready to take her mother's place. The family's manse is a fifteenth-century affair, all stone and shadows, and the sisters have been living in it under a layer of unspoken understanding.

Then Luke brings home a pretty young woman and introduces her as his fiancée. The emotional temperature in the house changes at once, and Elvira, who had quietly appointed herself her father's next great love, decides that she will stop at nothing to halt the marriage. The episode is a close study of a psychological disaster unfolding inside one family, far from the usual police procedural machinery. There are no detectives here, only the slow, exacting observation of a girl rearranging reality to suit her.

Emily Mortimer plays Elvira with the poised intensity the part needs, and Daisy Haggard's Spinny eats constantly and thinks the house is haunted, which may be the most sensible reaction anyone has. Anthony Andrews' Luke is the unknowing centre of it all, with Elspet Gray's Mrs Crossland, Alan MacNaughtan's Dean, Leon Lissek's Professor Cyprian, Jack Galloway's Anthony Lewis, Jeannie Crowther's Rosemary, Roger Hammond's Dr Trewynne and Helena Michell's Mary Leonard filling the academic world around them. Guy Meredith wrote it, and Piers Haggard directed.

The source novel's notes are clear about Elvira's anorexia, a fact that only slowly becomes obvious, and the episode carries that knowledge without announcing it. A girl who wants her father's love so badly she will stop at nothing: the groundwork is being laid for something dreadful, and the hour ends with the fiancée still in place and Elvira still planning.