May and June: Part Two

Part two picks up where part one left off. May has accepted her sister's offer of reconciliation, and something in her has changed. The mousy shell starts to come off, and with it goes the old deference. May, it turns out, is done with being overlooked, and she is not going back. The reconciliation she accepted in part one was the doorway; what she does on the other side of it is the episode's business.

The change in her drives the story. She seduces her sister's lover, and the act sends the household into a spin. Nothing about the household stays the same after it. The episode keeps its focus on the two women and the shift in the balance between them, with the local community gathered around like a chorus. The Landlady, Margery Lipton, the Vicar and Dr. Kendrew all have their parts to play in the atmosphere that closes in on the central relationship. For a mystery series, it spends surprisingly little time on crime; the mystery is in the two sisters themselves.

Ken Blakeson and Ruth Rendell share the writing credit, with James Cellan Jones directing again. Phoebe Nicholls is May, Christine Kavanagh is June, and Julian Wadham plays John Dyson. Sally Sanders appears as the Landlady, Elizabeth Ashley as Margery Lipton, Stuart Fox as the Vicar and Alistair Findlay as Dr. Kendrew. It closes the two-part tale and keeps the focus where the series does best: on the people. It aired on 14 February 1997.

The real mystery here is the architecture of a relationship between two people who share blood and a name. What happens when one of them finally decides to stop being the background is the whole of the drama. May's awakening is the show, and watching it is uncomfortable in the right way. June's elegant world, it turns out, was never as stable as it looked from the outside.