Get Millie Black ends with a Dickensian twist

[Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers for the Get Millie Black season finale, “Curtis.”]

Marlon James’ Get Millie Black has come to an end with all the twists and turns we’ve come to expect from a crime drama—and a few that are unique to the genre, like meaningful consequences for the dedicated detective at the center of the action. At the start of the season, Detective Millie Black (Tamara Lawrance) had returned to her native Jamaica after leaving Scotland Yard, disillusioned yet more determined than ever to set things right with her brother Orville. Only, the boy she felt she’d abandoned as a teen no longer existed; she was now trying to bond with her sister Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen), a trans woman living in Kingston’s Gully neighborhood, incredibly vulnerable but buoyed by her found family.

Soon, Millie embarked on the case that would consume her: searching for a local girl, Janet Fenton (Shernet Swearine), who had gotten mixed up with the ne’er-do-well son of one of Kingston’s most influential families. Janet’s disappearance led her to a missing boy, Romeo (Tijhon Rose), and Millie realized that these endangered children were part of a much larger conspiracy, one that extended well beyond Kingston, all the way to Millie’s second home: London. And while she was prepared to bring everyone, from the low-level enforcers to the people funding this human trafficking operation, to justice, Millie’s motivation remained deeply personal: Save this boy, because she couldn’t save the other one. 

TV is full of passionate, rule-breaking detectives who move heaven and earth to solve a case. HBO’s been host to several of them, including the iron-jawed cops of this year’s True Detective: Night Country. But in Get Millie Black, James challenged as many of the conventions as he embraced, first by centering Jamaica in his mystery, then by exploring the diaspora in the U.K. Season one had the requisite double crosses and double agents, but despite her previous experience with tracking down (sometimes unsuccessfully) missing children, Millie couldn’t have anticipated who the real mastermind would be. Episode five, “Curtis,” at long last revealed where Romeo was, who had taken him, and who was behind the human trafficking ring that had branched out to kidnapping children. 

Nico Danvers (Jamael Westman), who Millie tried to interrogate in prison in episode four, was behind Romeo’s kidnapping. He did so under the auspices of Lindo, which turned out to be an alias for his sister, Natalie Halliday née Danvers (Umi Meyers), and the whole child-smuggling operation. Natalie was the brains while Nico was the volatile variable: When he started having people killed to cover his tracks, his older sister naturally came to his aid. Millie finds out what the Danvers siblings have been doing with some help from the late Detective Holborn (Joe Dempsie), who becomes another one of their victims after Natalie realizes he’s no longer under their sway. After turning to her former Scotland Yard partners, Millie tracks down Romeo, then immediately finds herself in a shoot-out with Natalie. 

It’s there that Natalie spells out what Millie already knows(that ambition drove her to begin trafficking children along with adults) and reveals her other motivation—namely, keeping Nico safe. Millie, understandably weary from having to fight tooth and nail to get others to care about this case, nonetheless recognizes the instinct to protect. She sees herself and her sibling in Natalie and Nico, so she tries to reason with Natalie: “You’re trying to save him. Believe me, I get it. But the cost is too high.” Natalie is undeterred: “I won’t leave him holding the bag.” Millie tries to reassure her that what happened to Nico in foster care after they were separated wasn’t her fault. Natalie scoffs, “Well, he deserved better, right?” Millie replies, “So did you.” She says this with conviction not just because, as someone who’s spent years trying to find missing children, she knows what the foster care system is like, both in Jamaica and London. When Millie says Natalie and Nico deserved better when they were at their most vulnerable, she’s also finally showing her younger self some compassion. 

In the finale, we see Millie and Bis’ dynamic reflected—distorted though it may be—in Nico and Natalie’s relationship. But looking back, doubles were everywhere in Get Millie Black. Like Millie, Janet had a young boy’s life in her hands, but she chose to sacrifice him to better her own. Janet’s cruel mother echoed Millie and Bis’ own. As a closeted gay man posing as a ladies’ man to evade detection and harassment in his homophobic police department, Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) leads a double life that is threatened at every turn. Doubling is certainly the stuff of noir and other crime stories, which James looked to when constructing his own. But when combined with Millie’s selflessness bordering on self-destruction and the great expectations of the Danvers siblings—not to mention the voiceover that insisted this was, above all else, a “ghost story”—it’s downright Dickensian. You can practically hear Sydney Carton’s last words as Millie heads to London with no badge, no weapon, and no backup.  

When The A.V. Club caught up with James to discuss these themes, he agreed: “Nico and Natalie are kind of a parallel to Millie and Hibiscus or Millie and Orville. They have that ‘older sister trying to save younger brother’ thing.” But that development was more informed by crime fiction and colorism in Jamaica. James says he’s interested in stories of “family doing bad things together and what is at the core of all of that,” but he also considered the disconnect between what the Danvers siblings felt entitled to, and what the world had actually given them. Natalie and Nico are “the kind of rejects who didn’t expect to be rejects because they don’t look like rejects.” James explains that, for a long time, white-passing or white-presenting children were “snapped up by the mother country”: “You can’t have a straight-haired, blue-eyed boy in a Jamaican orphanage.” Natalie and Nico “should have been doing wonderfully well, and they got rejected all around.” Their sense of entitlement only grew as they got older, so “they no longer look at the world in terms of right and wrong—it’s ‘What can I get?’ and ‘What is in the way?'”

But Millie and Natalie are very much different sides of the same coin. Where self-preservation partially motivated Natalie to help Nico, Millie gave up everything to help Romeo and, in her mind, Orville. The season ends with Natalie in the wind and Millie unmoored, turning in her badge and selling the family home filled only with bad memories. Before the final moments of the finale, she still thought of Orville when looking at Hibiscus. It’s why she left her sister to go after Romeo, despite Bis’ own recent brush with death. Curtis’ voiceover notes how she broke up her own still-healing family in her search for Romeo: “Win one, you lose two.” James tells us Millie’s difficulty in seeing her sibling for who she is reflects the way diaspora communities live in a kind of “suspended animation” based on the year they moved from their homelands. “If they moved to America in 1986,” James says, “they’re still in ’86 and they hang around people who have the same values of ’86.” Like so many other immigrants, “she’s trying to capture the life that got interrupted.” When Millie says she’s home “for good” at the end of “Curtis,” she’s finally, truly seeing Bis.

Millie’s connection to Natalie and Nico is far from severed. James says that while it’s not explicitly stated in the finale, “There’s no way her saving this child from human trafficking is going to go unnoticed.” He notes that “Lindo is still alive, and she just wrecked them in a very, very bad way. So, what may very well happen is  the term “get Millie Black” changes—instead of “get Millie Black to help,” it’s now “go out and get her.” Again, two sides of the same coin. Millie would potentially become the quarry while Natalie becomes the hunter. Asked where Millie goes from here, James says, “Millie thinks she’s done with the missing, but I don’t think she is. I think she thinks she’s done with the loss and I don’t think she is.” If he got a second season, James would want to further explore Millie’s motivations: “I think it’s too easy to just say she became a cop just to save her brother. I think the question [in season two] is [whether she] would be a cop anymore. And that is really up for debate.”