Hello and welcome back to Etude to Eden! Today’s update concerns a show I always have the urge to rewatch: Broadchurch. Besides my drive to watch programs that are British in origin and also happen to include David Tennant, Broadchurch cements itself as a favorite show of mine due to its ability to display the complexities of tragedy and trauma as it affects individuals, families, and an entire community thrown off its axis. The show follows the lives of people in a small town in the wake of the murder of a young child, Danny Latimer, and the extensive investigation to find who killed him. The challenges of the investigation slowly make the people of the town turn against each other, families develop significant internal conflicts, and secrets of the past come to light for many. For this blog, I will go into detail of the results and plot twists of the first two seasons of the show, so if you want to watch this show for the first time and witness the mystery unfold, go watch it first–it is definitely worth it. WARNING: This post includes major spoilers for the TV show Broadchurch.
The song I am going to pair with this show is “Orange Juice” by Noah Kahan. I have desperately wanted to use this song in a blog, and I believe some of the developments for certain characters within the show work in tandem with the emotional beats within the song. “Orange Juice” may be one of my favorite songs, and I hope this blog may do it some justice and expose others to the wonders of Noah Kahan’s music.
“Orange Juice” tells the narrative of someone struggling with addiction and consequently how their relationships have been damaged by their attempts to both heal and grieve. The song is especially impactful and poignant, so here are the entirety of the lyrics to get a sense of the tone and story it conveys:
Honey, come over, the party’s gone slower
And no one will tempt you, we know you got sober
There’s orange juice in the kitchen, bought for the children
It’s yours if you want it, we’re just glad you could visit
Feels like I’ve been ready for you to come home
For so long
That I didn’t think to ask you where you’d gone
Why’d you go?
And you said, “Mhm, mmm”
And you said
You said my heart has changed and my soul has changed
And my heart, and my heart
That my face has changed, and I haven’t drank in six months
On the dot
See the graves as you pass through, from our crash back in ’02
Not one nick on your finger, you just asked me to hold you
But it made you a stranger and filled you with anger
Now I’m third in the lineup to your Lord and your Savior
Feels like I’ve been ready for you to come home
For so long
That I didn’t think to ask you where you’d gone
So why’d you go?
And you said, “Mhm-mhm-mhm-mmm”
And you said, “Mmm-hmm”
You said my heart has changed and my soul has changed
And my heart, and my heart
That my life has changed, that this town had changed
And you had not
That the world has changed, don’t you find it strange
That you just went ahead and carried on?
And you know I’d say the last time I drank
I was face down, passed out, there on your lawn
Are we all just crows to you now?
Are we all just pulling you down?
You didn’t put those bones in the ground
You didn’t put those bones in the ground
Honey, come over, the party’s gone slower
And no one will tempt you, we know you got sober
There’s orange juice in the kitchen, bought for the children
It’s yours if you want it, we’re just glad you could visit
The overarching narrative of Broadchurch may not focus on the central topic of this song, but the themes, emotions, and motivations established mimic much of the characterization utilized. Throughout much of the first season of the show, it is clear one of the main characters, Alec Hardy, has a lot of secrets weighing him down from the past, but it isn’t until the second season that the viewer sees them come to light and become the driving plot of the season.
Season two includes two major plotlines, one of which is the natural progression of the first season, featuring the trial of the person discovered to be the killer of Danny. The second highlights an old cold case of Hardy’s from a nearby town, Sandbrook, which saw the death of two girls, Pippa and Lisa. The Sandbrook case is an engaging narrative from its introduction, mainly because it is presented to us with nearly all the pieces that simply fail to be put together into a sound trial in its own right. Much of Hardy’s troubles surrounding the case concerns how personal the investigation became for him. Sandbrook was his home and he was the prime inspector on the case. He had the misfortune of finding the body of Pippa floating in a nearby river. Here starts the beginning of his horrors pertaining to the case, as finding the decaying body of the girl traumatized him and made him averse to bodies of water, and finding Pippa hit him particularly hard because she was the same age as his own daughter, Daisy.
The case resulted in significant family strife among Hardy’s household, particularly between him and his wife, Tess, who was discovered to be cheating on Hardy at the end of the initial investigation. It was through this cheating scandal that Tess indirectly prevented the case from reaching a proper conclusion as she lost key evidence after her car was broken into during one of her affairs. Despite Tess being largely at fault for the failure of the investigation and the dissolution of their family structure, Hardy took on all the blame for the events that unfolded, hoping to protect Daisy from the nasty truth of things and to not look harshly upon her mother. As a result, Hardy lost practically everything he held dear to him, including his sanity, and failed to bring justice to two innocent girls; thus, he moved to Broadchurch to distance himself from Sandbrook.
Returning to Sandbrook weighs heavily on Hardy’s heart, quite literally given his severe heart arrhythmia developed in the outset of these events, signifying how his “heart has changed and [his] soul has changed.” Even though it takes a great toll on him physically and mentally to return to this cursed town, he cannot move on from who he became after these events without doing right by those two girls. The moments and people from the past keep forcing a reckoning within him, especially given he returns to the case due to two potential suspects of the crime returning to town quite suddenly. Most of the rest of the town “went ahead and carried on” after the tragic events of the Sandbrook murders, but Hardy’s entire life trajectory has been irreparably shifted on its axis and is now trying to find solace for himself and those involved to finally prove himself as a detective, father, and friend.
Hardy is made to open up more in the presence of his coworker, Ellie Miller. It’s hard to ever truly call them friends, but after the events of the second season it seems remiss not to. While Hardy has seen significant traumas and conflict in his past, the audience has the displeasure to watch most of Miller’s most formative moments of the latter portions of her life on screen. Not only does she also become displaced from her home, but it is because by the end of season one you come to discover that her husband is the one who killed Danny and is thus on trial throughout the span of season two. She could remain in her house, but due to both the poor associations within the home after her husband’s secrets come to light that “make her a stranger” within her own home, and Broadchurch’s distrust of her after her failure to identify her own husband as the murderer in the case she was on, “[filling her] with anger],” it’s hard to return to a place that feels so unwelcoming. Everything unfolding also creates an incredibly strained relationship with her eldest son, Tom, who wishes not to see her and goes on the stand to defend his father. By the end of season two, she has the strength to finally reel her family back together from the shambles it was left in and return to her home in her town, but the lasting marks from the results linger still.
Throughout the course of the show, Hardy and Miller remain as rocks in each other’s lives that they can rely on to pull themselves out of the deepest depths. It is Miller who forces Hardy to care for his own health so he doesn’t drop dead on her on the job, and it is her who helps him piece the Sandbrook case back together and close it once and for all. It is Hardy who picks Miller back up after being told it was her husband who murdered Danny and supports her through the trial and nearly every other aspect of her personal life. From the outside, these two characters are unapproachable wrecks marred by cruel instances in their past. But, they have been hardened from their experiences and came out the other side stronger than before ready to take on what the rest of life has to throw at them. “Orange Juice” pairs so well with this show because of the discourse happening between the two speakers in the song. These characters represent the distant one returning home, with the towns and people within them trying to welcome them back without knowing the true damage that has been done. Neither of them “put those bones in the ground,” but they can now let them rest.
– Lauren Lotarski, Managing Editor
Lauren Lotarski – Managing Editor, Poetry Editor, Layout Editor & Blogger: Lauren is a Senior at Lewis University majoring in Psychology and English with a concentration in Literature and Language. When not in class, she can be found working at the university library or engaging in her various hobbies, such as reading, drawing, or knitting. Some of her favorite authors include Leigh Bardugo, Charles Dickens, and Neil Gaiman. She hopes to improve upon her writing skills and knowledge of literature during her time at Lewis in order to apply it to her future endeavors.
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