It was an eventful Sunday in Roarton Valley this week: Philip’s morality was tested, Kieren was found to be the First Risen, and Sue outdid herself on the roast beef. In The Flesh’s winning combination of mythology and banality continued to charm as series two lurched significantly towards its endgame. The speech of the episode though, goes to Luke Newberry for that vehement account of Kieren’s rising story at the Sunday lunch table. As well as performing the narrative job of perking up Simon’s ears, it was also a blinder of a monologue and a turning point for the character. After weeks of attempting to dial down conflict, Kieren snapped. Between Paris, the locals, Give Back, Simon, and the new-look HVF coming over for tea, Ren was finally pushed over his limits; death by a thousand bigoted pinpricks. Structurally, episode four was very neatly drawn. Everything was sandwiched tidily between Philip’s fantasy of Amy and the real thing, signifying his character’s leap from dream to reality, and from the back to the foreground. The character of Maxine Martin, a pillar of evil in a Dorothy Perkins skirt suit, continues to be series two’s only weak link. Her levels of evil moustache-twirling this week were so high that actress Wunmi Mosaku was in danger of pulling the thing clean off. In The Flesh’s series one villains – Vicar Oddie and Bill Macy – were its weakest-drawn characters, and Maxine Martin looks to be continuing that trend. With two episodes remaining though, all that could change. At the start of this week’s instalment, Philip Wilson was a grey-faced jobsworth even whose sexual fantasies were comically dull (“Oh Philip, you’re so adept!”). By the end of the episode though, he was heroic, sacrificing his public reputation to preach love and tolerance in the face of placards and bigotry. Maxine Martin may lack any sympathetic or redeeming qualities as a character now, but let’s see where we stand on her come the finale. Undead agitator Simon must also be in line for the chop. His demise would be much less popular after this week’s Philip-like transformation from creepy one-note manipulator to lost soul in love, desperate to learn how to be normal and willing to try. Unlikely as it is, I hope Simon makes it, mostly for the soppy romance of lines like “…because there’s what I believe, and then there’s you”. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. There’s a great deal to get through before we tally up series two’s eventual body count: Amy’s physical deterioration, Jem’s psychological deterioration (fingers crossed that’s her last ‘student film hallucination sequence’), Simon and Kieren’s relationship, the dead GP’s receptionist, Sue’s tangled bunting… Three episodes really didn’t feel like enough for the first run, and now that series two is really motoring, neither does six. Read Louisa’s review of the previous episode, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
