Landscapers’ case begins to close, but the truth stays elusive

Landscapers begins this week with a macabre aesthetic, crafting demonic visions of the Wycherlys out of Olivia Colman’s Susan and David Thewlis’ Chris and making an eerily glowing tableau out of the Wycherlys tucked under their bed as Susan supposedly left them. Is this supposed to be a nightmare in the heads of the Edwards’ or an opening flirtation of the obscenity that attracts so many to true-crime legends such as this? Well, it’s both.

The nightmare cascades into retro dating video confessionals given by the both of them, naturally expressing their love for films. Are these videos forensic or fictional? Are we watching evidence amassed by the police or the more perfect imagining of the past in Susan’s daydreams? Her and Chris’ past optimism plays out in front of a gaudy retro background, the brightness of which contrasts painfully in Colman’s dejected expression in the real world. By now, it has become clear that Landscapers is less of a murder mystery than it is a character study of a very isolated marriage, but the lines between what is real and imagined continues to blur tragically.

And this week’s episode functions to contextualize their emotional dependency with further details as Christopher begins to come into focus, with Thewlis’ grumbling, understated performance develops a new dimension of heartbreaking sacrifice. In case you thought Susan was the more broken of the two, this chapter aims to dispel that, just as the investigation aims to brush off Susan’s testimony for a version where the Edwards’ knew what they were doing and why.

Once again, we flash back to the Edwards years before the crime. While an inconsolable Chris is in a deep depression over the death of his brother, this is when Susan hatches the idea to write a fan letter to Gerard Depardieu asking for a return note to brighten Chris’ spirit. With Susan’s can-do chipperness, this seems guided more by kindness than the desperation and delusion that has defined her, even in her own version of herself. This incapacitating devastation is confirmed in the present day by Chris’ stepmother (the one who turned him in) when she is interviewed by Samuel Anderson’s investigator Paul Wilkie. But she also asserts that this made Chris drawn to “fragile” types (there’s that word again). “That’s Chris, you see,” she says, “he’s always trying to save someone, and he never manages to do it.”

While as a whole creative vision Landscapers presents a blurring between fact and fiction, its two sides of the truth are pushing into a more rigid presentation of what happened. The flashbacks here are seen in simple, nostalgic black and white, normally a most basic of cinematic approaches to a character’s vision of their past. In comparison to their more stylistically embellished memories, this unvarnished quality feels less open to interpretation, like the Edwards attempting to look soberly at their past for once. But the police’s version is equally sturdy, making the two versions incongruous.

Chris thinks he clarifies their version, but really hands the cops what they need. The Wycherlys had convinced Susan to help pay for part of their own, only to manipulate her to hand over her shares later and selling the house for a large sum that they kept to themselves. In an attempt to portray Susan as another in a history of lost cases for Chris to save, the cops pull out photos of his beloved dead brother and mother. “I wasn’t trying to save my mother or my brother, I was trying to love them. And that’s all I’ve ever done with Susan,” he says, with Thewlis playing him falling straight into the trap. Rather than selling Susan out (which anyone would know he’d never do), he gives them what they need in the name of preserving her honor. It’s the final piece to seal up a case on he and Susan: he once owned guns and had a gun club membership. The observing cops cheer like they are at a sports match, or like they got a juicy and long-teased detail in their trashiest TV.

Emma again takes control of the series’ metastorytelling, staging the investigation’s version of events for Susan as the sets collapse and they cross the Landscapers soundstage into the Wycherly home. It’s the cruel inverse of the modest, straightforward version of the Edwards’ flashbacks this episode, also too plainly put to be the exact truth. Emma’s version of the crime has Susan barking and swearing, with Susan witnessing it in a panic as her version slips further away. Though Landscapers has been sympathetic to the Edwards from the beginning, this episode reveals a more neutral stance on what the truth is in their case. But in this is a tactile reality, there’s an upsetting irony to how this can’t be how it happened either.

Though Landscapers has been sympathetic to the Edwards from the beginning, this episode reveals a more neutral stance on what the truth is in their case, with empathy its own complicated, insufficient minefield. We expect continued celebration among the police successfully wrapping the investigation, but there is a slight note of doubt on Emma’s face as her boss describes the Edwards as cold-blooded killers, caught all due to their efforts. She gives a call to her father, her own lost cause. As an attempt at reassurance and consoling common ground, Douglas tells Susan he had been to prison in his youth; Susan lashes out, refusing his attempted compatriotship. Douglas is seen crying alone on the bus. In trying to understand ourselves and one another, we can’t predict which walls will fall or be built. Landscapers might itself be despairing the impossibility of what it is trying to attempt.

A western orchestral track plays cinematically over Susan reading the returned letter from the false Gerard Depardieu, and we’re back to their black and white memory. Her little Lee Israel moment worked, getting him out of bed and with a brighter disposition. This is the kind of (devotional, not entirely healthy) nurturing care we’ve seen Chris provide for Susan, and now we realize that Susan performs the same function for him. Theirs is a codependent kind of tenderness where one creates a reality in which the other can cope, where they can rescue one another from their darkest days. In the end, neither of them could save the other.

Landscapers’ pitch as a true-crime series has always been a deception, not only giving way to a limited series with a lot on its mind about the type of show it wanted you to think it was, but also one with crushing ideas about our inability to fully grasp the reality of one another’s circumstances. And at the center of that despair is a harmonious duet between Colman and Thewlis giving us a faint glimmer of hope for understanding. Or maybe that’s also a well-constructed delusion.

Stray observations

• The show offers that the Edwards were receiving government funding for pretending the Wycherlys lived with them, and were delaying required check-up visits. Seems like an easily documentable deception for the police to gloss over in the investigation.
• Susan wears a modest aubergerine gem sweater in her dating interview video. An excellent choice!
• Samuel Anderson in a cowboy hat after they wrap the case, a usurping of the iconography Susan adores, but also an excellent choice!
• Chris hides that he raged to Susan over the Wycherlys’ manipulation because I guess he only gives out the information that will actually make the case worse for him versus how he thinks it will make him look.