When a colleague tells her that Ryan has been visiting Tommy, you can see that every fiber of her body wants to scream, even as she completely keeps it to herself.

She is still capable of being hurt - as we see frequently throughout these six concluding episodes - but nothing will ever be as bad as what Tommy did to Becky, nor will Catherine ever let others see how much pain she is in anymore. After all, the worst moment of her life happened years before we first met her. Paul Oakenfold Faces Sexual Harassment Lawsuit From Former Personal AssistantĪmong the best decisions Wainwright and Lancashire made in building this character is how matter-of-fact Catherine is, no matter how dire or unfair the situation. There are other cases, involving Rob and his addict wife Joanna (Mollie Winnard), a sketchy pharmacist (Amit Shah), and a local crime syndicate, but they feel more obligatory than in previous years, and several of them get wrapped up in abrupt and somewhat confusing(*) fashion in the finale. It’s the latter that proves the heart of the season. Ann is about to be promoted to detective, while Tommy Lee Royce re-enters the picture on work and family levels yet again, since he knew the murdered man from the opening scene, while Catherine’s sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran) and Clare’s boyfriend Neil (Con O’Neill) have been going behind Catherine’s back to bring Ryan to the prison for get-to-know-you visits with his father. Ryan is 16, playing goalie for a school team and letting his bad temper - which he seems to have inherited from his monster of a father - occasionally get him into trouble with coach Rob Hepworth (Mark Stanley). And part of it is that Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright needed to let Rhys Connah grow into a young adult before telling the third and final chapter of the Cawood family’s story.Īs the season begins, Catherine is close to retirement, able to recite the exact number of months, weeks, and days she has left to anyone who asks. Part of this was that Lancashire’s incredibly busy, like in her very different role as Julia Child on HBO Max’s Julia. earlier this year and is being released today in the States on Acorn TV, AMC+, and BBC America. It’s been a long wait for this third season, which came out in the U.K. In one of the most harrowing yet spine-tingling sequences I’ve ever seen in any television drama, Catherine stumbles upon Ann’s basement prison, does battle with Tommy, and ultimately has to be saved by the woman she has come to rescue. While Catherine is going about routine police business, we see that Tommy has abducted and serially raped the wealthy Ann Gallagher (Charlie Murphy) as part of a botched kidnap-and-ransom plot. The first season of Happy Valley was a crime drama masterclass, pitting Catherine against the worst figure of her nightmares: Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), the man who raped and impregnated her daughter Becky, who committed suicide a week after giving birth to Catherine’s grandson Ryan (Rhys Connah). Here she is, one more time, her uniform splattered with mud, still underestimated by everyone, still smarter and tougher than the rest. When a pair of veteran detectives arrive, they dismiss her attempts to offer advice on the case, then are stunned when she can identify the body because she recognizes its repaired collarbone from an old case.

Catherine, still played by the great Sarah Lancashire, shows up at a construction site near a dirty pond, where a backhoe has inadvertently dug up old human remains. It has been more than seven years since we last saw Catherine Cawood, the world-weary Yorkshire cop heroine of the excellent British drama Happy Valley, and our first new glimpse of her in forever seems about right.

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