1.6 No Goodbyes Thanks Quietly is the first answer. Its makers had keen instincts as to when to let the landscape and the story speak for itself. It began with Tui’s silent bike ride to the lake, and ended with her stood wordlessly in Paradise, only giving young Jacqueline Joe a handful of lines during the six hours in between. TV crime drama has a weakness for gabbling exposition, from audience-avatar sidekicks narrating cases and clues, to rain-soaked monologues and melodramatic face-offs between heroes and foes. Unusually, the final ten minutes of Top of the Lake’s finale were practically dialogue-free. Those ten minutes ticked dutifully by as we’ve come to expect from crime mystery conclusions, from false ending to final twist. By setting Robin’s discovery in daylight, and by forgoing rooftop confrontations or high-tension chase scenes in favour of wordless dread though, Top of the Lake avoided cliché and showcased the stripped-down strength of its lead performance. You’d have been no kind of a crime TV viewer if Sergeant Al hadn’t fallen under suspicion at some point or another over the last six weeks. Whether it was the stag’s head on his office wall (a symbol from the opening credits and Bob Platt’s concealed “brown room” photographs), his familiarity with Tui in episode one, his incongruously flash pad where he (we think) drugged Robin in episode four, or that gesture towards Tegan in his ‘business meeting’ at the café, the clues were there. The grimy revelation wasn’t especially surprising, but then Top of the Lake’s procedural side wasn’t its priority. Whether it was their intention or not, Campion and co-writer Gerard Lee erected the detective genre as a scaffold to support the other, weirder story elements. Al ran a sloppy shop we know, but the detective parts were never Top of the Lake’s most convincing moments (Robin was sequestered to work a case while on leave visiting her dying mother? Then allowed back on the investigation after glassing her rapist?). Eccentricities like GJ and the container camp, mute-by-choice bone-loving teenager Jamie, and Matt’s self-flagellation at his mother’s graveside were what made the series the unlikely, surprising holiday from normality that it was. Its characters too, even the weirdoes and the brutes, were charismatically written and performed. Moss was so convincing as Robin it’ll be harder to shake the image of her in a puffa jacket and hoodie come the next season of Mad Men than it was the other way around six weeks ago. Peter Mullan’s performance, it goes without saying these days, was flawless, while David Wenham carried Al’s hidden depravity with horrible charm from start to finish. Holly Hunter, as Matt Mitchum mirror GJ (both powerful, antagonistic and in this episode at least, practically sharing the same dialogue), was barely there, but held your focus for every second of her screentime. One of the drama’s coups was its repositioning of gender and sexuality in crime TV. Unlike so much else we see, its nudity was male and female, rarely titillating, sometimes comic and often banal. The fact I even registered my pleasure at Robin being a female law enforcer who didn’t stalk around her apartment wearing tiny knickers and holding a big gun just shows how engrained the clichés of women in crime TV drama are. Not that Top of the Lake was perfect on that front – Robin’s rape, though well-woven into the plot threads, is an over-familiar origin story for a crime fighter – though at least it was her, and not her boyfriend the trauma motivated to fight crime. That’s the really exciting thing about Top of the Lake. It loves crime mystery, but that doesn’t mean it puts up with any of its bullshit. As a non-flashy, non-Hollywood turning point for detective TV, it’s exploded the possibilities of where the genre, and its women, could go next. A triumph. Please, if you can, support our charity horror stories ebook, Den Of Eek!, raising money for Geeks Vs Cancer. Details here.
