Cucumber Episode 6: Television as (Devastatingly Dark) Art

A spoiler-filled and hastily written reaction to THAT Cucumber episode (Episode 6).

The tragedy was not just the fact of a death, but that the character didn’t get the chance to change.

UK Channel 4’s Cucumber, by Russell T. Davies, is amazing TV anyway – complex and only partly likable characters, smart dialogue, the repercussions of life decisions, 21^st century culture. (Not to mention a lot of gay sex. Like, a lot.)

But episode 6, which I watched last night on catch-up and am still processing, took the show to a whole new level. 

Instead of jumping between stories with a main focus on Henry, through the episode we follow only Lance (Cyril Nri), Henry’s long-time partner and now ex. At the very start of the episode you see on the screen, across a shot of Lance taking Henry’s usual opening place in the supermarket, “Lance Edward Sullivan 1966-2015” - before an extended series of flashback scenes throughout Lance’s life, literally from birth.

It is testament to the foolish hope of us humans, and to the knowledge of TV’s use of twists and misdirection (on which knowledge Davies relies, using the audience’s own sophistication against us), that even after seeing this, I thought “well, that doesn’t necessarily mean death” – maybe this is a flashback setting him up for the future with a new start, or an indication that his life after can’t be known.

The caption acts as vague foreboding over the rest of the episode (not that it needed it, there’s enough danger signs in the plot and characters) but one deliberately forgets, or minimises. One hopes. And the end that comes is shocking despite the scrupulously fair play of the writer and producer.

So, what is Lance’s life? It is a life of being nice - of trying, of wanting to please, of not rocking the boat. It is a very understandable reaction to growing up black and gay that he is accepting to the point of being a victim of abuse – and that acceptance and passivity contributes to his death in one of the clearest and most devastating examples I’ve seen of how a set of reasonable (or at least, non-crazy) choices can lead to a position of danger and to being ill-equipped to deal with that. Over the course of the montage, he goes from motherless child, to awkward boyfriend, to nearly-estranged son, to gradually making it in Manchester and meeting Henry. And there's also some enthusiastically dorky dancing thrown in there.

One thing I’ve not seen mentioned in the few post-show pieces I’ve read, even by RTD himself in a lengthy and very good Radio Times interview, is how this show changed the viewer perspective on Henry. To me, in this episode he crosses the line from grumpy and selfish but still a point of viewer identification, to someone that damages Lance to an extent that can be characterized as abuse. 

In the flashback scenes of Lance and Henry’s new relationship, we see how Henry doesn’t just avoid Lance’s overtures of sex, but he defends himself from exposure by attacking. He attacks Lance with words, as Daniel will later attack physically, each to cover their own insecurities and Lance’s mild challenges. In Henry’s case this takes the form of gaslighting – Lance’s very reasonable expectation of being able to talk about sex (in a relationship that has already had intimacy), and his moderate suggestions and expressions of desire, are positioned by Henry as unreasonable, as ridiculously timed, as abnormal.

That sort of behaviour can be abuse. We had already seen Lance in younger times being willing to please and passive – he went along with his college girlfriend’s kissing, he doesn’t force himself on his father’s company after coming out – but for me the key to this story is that Henry and Lance’s time together deepened the pathology, and that ultimately led to Lance’s death.

Lance subsumed his own desires so completely (no penetrative sex for 9 years, remember!) that he was unsure how to act on them once out of the relationship and feeling attracted to Daniel. Even more damagingly, Henry screwed up Lance’s instincts of what normal, or safe, or non-abusive, might look like. Daniel was, as RTD says, a clearly dangerous person from his first appearance, and a threatening one. He has irrational flashes of anger, is controlling, and is inconsistent in his dealings with Lance. Lance had some idea of danger – hence the vision of Hazel and thinking about leaving Daniel’s place before anything happens – but his self-preservation skills,  and his trust in his own instincts, are rusty. And for me what we see is that he had been taught repeatedly, by Henry, that his wants and his sense of what was appropriate were wrong.

Taking up with Daniel, shaping himself to what Daniel did in the moment, was a repeat of a pattern for Lance. And how desperately I was wanting him to learn that, wanting this fictional character to see that he had problems and to stop the nervous smiling and “going along with things” (by the way, hat tip to the actor playing college Lance: he nails the overeager smile and the intonations, it was easy to believe this could have been a younger version of the same character).

Midway through the episode, once we move from flashback to present day, there’s what I believe is meant to be a pivotal scene in Lance’s (and once Henry’s) suburban home. I’m calling it the “bread scene”. Henry has come in and says that he loves Lance – meant to be a big deal for this “repressed” character. (Though in previous episodes we have seen that Henry is skint and unemployed, and getting out in the wider world involves having to deal with the whole sex thing still – Henry has yet to learn his lessons too, and the declaration of love has more than a whiff of self-interest and opportunism). 

In response, we get a big, actorly speech from Lance about how love doesn’t mean anything and whether Henry loves him or not doesn’t matter, minds just accrete random facts …OK, to be honest I found this stilted and unrealistic and a weak spot in the middle of otherwise really amazing TV, and just sort of deliberately blanked it out because it was artificial and wrong. If you start thinking to yourself “the writer is giving the actor an awards-bait scene here” while it’s going on? That’s a hint it’s not good.  

The scene ends with Henry saying “is this what I’ve done to you?” to himself.

And I was sitting there thinking that the otherwise brilliant production team had missed their own bloody point. The thing Henry did to Lance is NOT that Lance thought that “love” is meaningless and got all cynical. It’s that he didn’t get cynical enough! Lance still responds to others by trying to match their expectations and wants. In my head, the revised version of this scene follows up more on “what does that mean?” – does Henry saying he loves Lance mean that he’ll do something about the sex issues? Will he care about Lance’s needs? What, in short, changes? If Lance had got to that point it would have been significant.

But, as anyone reading this presumably knows, that didn’t happen. An increasingly controlling Daniel (who moves Lance on from bar to bar, and doesn’t even let him choose his own drink) takes Lance home, there’s mutual masturbation and sucking-off, and after Daniel cums, he erupts with anger and attacks Lance for “forcing himself” on Daniel. There’s something of a physical attack by hand, to which Lance doesn’t really react, and then Daniel grabs a golf club and almost casually hits Lance in the head, once. It’s enough.

As the viewer sits there stunned, Lance, bleeding, again sees a series of flashbacks through his life, in a painfully slow closing down of the mind. And – he dies.

It is television at its height, showing that the other side of the coin from explicit sex is explicit violence and if you were prepared to watch one, what right have to you turn from the other? It’s a deliberately long, confronting scene, with blood dripping from Lance’s head for such an eternity, you’re wondering if he could have been saved – again, foolish hope.

A fictional life was cut short, and worse, unredeemed. As a viewer you invest in these characters, and you want all the (to paraphrase Doctor Who) "growthy changey stuff". If Lance had had a moment of realization, if there’d been a single scene where he realized he was acting in a way that he had acted before, or that Henry and/or Daniel was being unreasonable – if he’d then died in the exact same way, with Daniel attacking him based on his own issues, then I would have felt sad still, but it would have been a fulfilled sadness. I could have believed in the modern fantasy of self-development, of overcoming our flaws. But this is drama subtle enough to avoid that option, to show that many people don’t ever learn from their own habits and they die repeating old mistakes and without revelation. It shows, in other words, the futility of the human condition. We as viewers are left with the uncomfortable feeling that Lance was left with his journey unfinished, but that if Daniel hadn't happened along, there would have been - at least for a while longer - other men that hurt him instead (physically or psychologically), and other relationships that failed to meet his needs, while he smiled and smiled and said nothing.

I went into this week’s episode hoping it would be The One Where Henry Does Sex – because obviously Henry as the main character does need to get over some of his issues too, but in an eight episode run having the sex thing come as the final culminating episode would be too tidy – you need an aftermath too. Episode 6 seemed about right to me.

Instead I got something far darker and more stunning, a death that will lead to changes for the other characters but is not merely a plot device - a death that is the end of a shown, complex, flawed life given full weight by the production team and actors.

This is television that will stay with me for a long time, and from the reactions on Twitter I’m not the only one. It is a wonderful thing to go away from a piece of art with the feeling that your brain cannot contain the ideas awoken, and that you just need to go away and let it boil down for a while and No I don’t want to talk about it right now ok? Yes it was good, now just shut up and go somewhere else for a while. (The last time I had this feeling was after the Rembrandt exhibition that I saw in January, so I’m putting RTD in the same company as RVR. Not an inapt comparison at that, they both portray characters with compassion and yet clarity on their imperfections.)

 I am not done processing Cucumber6 yet, but part of the enjoyment of art arises when you mix in the ingredient of other people’s responses. There was something I expected but didn't see in the ones I did read and so I wanted to put out there the idea – somewhat contradicting what Davies has said, but art is for the audience as well – that this is more than just “One Bad Night”. This is, like, 50% One Bad Night, 50% One Whole Life: a whole life of tiny moments of thinking about saying something but choosing not to protest, of settling for waiting for the other person, of learning to consider one’s own instincts and desires and full personhood (including sex) as unimportant. This mixture of timescales, the drawn-out instant and the compressed lifetime, could easily have come across as over-the-top tragedy or as too facile a lesson, but instead Russell T. Davies, Alice Troughton and the team have shown how television as a medium can be used for novel structures of storytelling. It's really exciting to be a viewer of something that feels like it's doing something new like that!

In the longer arc of the series, Episode 6 has shaken up the rest of the story, especially that of Henry, who is now far less sympathetic a character - dangerously so, if he's our viewpoint. I'm still hoping that this will be acknowledged, but also that he, at least, has the opportunity for redemption from some of his bad patterns of behaviour.  

Thanks to the whole Cucumber team, and I can’t wait for next week’s show.