It might make it easier to sleep at night, to be less afraid of dripping taps in the kitchen or the ceaseless drumming of rain on the window, reflecting the blackness outside back in, but dammit, it’s still a shame to reach the end of Remember Me.
It’s rare enough to find such an exquisitely sad piece of drama anywhere on British television, let alone one shrouded in the unremitting claustrophobia of a ghost story. For a melancholic tale of people and possessiveness, loss and revenge, horror and heartache lingering through a century like the smell of rancid milk to appear on BBC One during primetime, and for it to be a work of supreme quality to boot … You may as well search for a particular seashell on a beach absolutely teeming with them. The likelihood of anything turning up is pretty slim.
That’s why it was a surprise that Remember Me was such a masterwork of terrible beauty and gloom. Now, it’s over we can only look back fondly, lament its passing, and let it go – a lesson it took Tom Parfitt many decades to finally learn.
Rob Fairholme (Mark Addy) tries to explain to his boss DCI Grogan (Tony Pitts) that there’s something supernatural about the deaths in the Parfitt case. Grogan is scornful at first, then – worse – sympathetic. He suggests Rob take some time off to get his head together.
Meanwhile, Hannah Ward (Jodie Cromer) is in Scarborough, still haunted by dark folk refrains and her visions of watery horrors. When Rob arrives, he tries to convince her there’s a rational explanation for everything in spite of himself – but the photo of Sean with Isha, the spectral ayah, standing at his side leaves no room for doubt.
Having vanished with Isha at the end of Episode 2, Tom (Michael Palin) reappears on the cliffs above Scarborough Bay, looking bedraggled, full of water and utterly at the end of his tether. ‘I just wanted to be free,’ he mumbles. ‘But she’ll not let me go. Not ever.’
This is both true and misleading. As a young man, Tom went to meet Richard Hutton, singer of a particularly beguiling adaptation of ‘Scarborough Fair’ with a last verse powerful enough to lay ghosts to rest. Instead, he met the man’s granddaughter Dorothea and fell in love. Tom told Dorothea that his nanny from childhood was still with him, despite having died in a shipping tragedy many years before.
Upon returning from honeymoon, Dorothea tried to banish Isha by singing the final part of her grandfather’s song, but Tom silenced his new bride by pushing her down the stairs.
‘You killed your wife!’ Hannah says, appalled. ‘You chose Isha.’
‘She came back from the dead for me,’ Tom replies. ‘How could I send her back there?’
By this point, Isha has taken Sean into the millpond near the old people’s home and is slowly pushing him under. Hannah and Tom have taken a boat out after them. Hannah dives into the black water, trying to save her brother, but all she’s doing is bringing her nightmares of drowning to life. Tom, the centenarian, the killer, the prisoner, the pensioner who has been ten years old forever, considers his life and its fleeting moments of joy. Then he sings the last verse of ‘Scarborough Fair’. Slowly, eyes never leaving him, Isha descends into the water.
Hannah surfaces and Sean is saved by Rob. Yet when they look out to the centre of the lake, the boat is empty, motionless, floating – just as it was in Hannah’s dreams. ‘They’re both gone,’ Rob says in relief. Below the surface, Tom sinks into the dark in Isha’s protective embrace.
Although this concluding instalment of Remember Me can’t quite match the choking sense of foreboding that hung over its two predecessors like winter fog, it has its fair share of horror movie shocks – and if it lacks the claustrophobic, peculiarly Northern bleakness of episodes one and two, the sadness that fills this gap is just as desolate, just as affecting. The closing shots of Tom’s deserted house, the empty chair at the window and the forgotten photographs on the mantelpiece, are almost unbearable in their poignancy.
There are some tiny nits to pick: the ending is flagged up by Formula One track marshals from the beginning, while the Ward family’s personal travails teeter perilously on the brink of soapy irrelevance. But to complain about these minor flaws is akin to slagging off Marilyn Monroe’s choice of lipstick or the way Rembrandt signed off his paintings.
This is a perfectly satisfying conclusion to a drama that is, in the very best sense of the word, haunting.
Aired at 9pm on Sunday 7 December 2014 on BBC One.
> Order Remember Me on DVD on Amazon.
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