Making last night’s Episode 1 feel increasingly redundant, the second instalment of Utopia 2 brings us up to speed on where everyone is since we last left them aaaaaages ago, and does little else.
But only in a show like this could that not really matter. Because Utopia is so abrasively bonkers it manages to make even an hour of reunions feel like taking a basket of electrified citrus fruits and licking each one with your eyeballs.
Not that there’s such zesty fun for our conspiracy chums. For most, life is a torturous slog.
Ian (Nathan Stewart-Jarret) is so numbed by the 9 to 5 that he’s tempted to tongue a stapler in order to feel something. Dugdale (Paul Higgins) clumsily oscillates between the twin despairs of The Network’s all-control of him, and the ready-meal life of a man in a big empty house. And then there’s Jessica (Fiona O’Shaughnessy), who’s life at the hands of The Network’s interrogators really is torturous, and tattooed with scars as proof.
About to end her life when we see her again, Becky (Alexandra Roach) swiftly moves from attempted suicide to aiding her Thoraxin dealer Donaldson in an increasingly dark farce involving a professorial Kevin Eldon (surely the most under-rated UK comic ever) and an unrecognisably shaggy Ian McDiarmid. It’s Utopia‘s twisted way of reminding you that it’s not all doom and gloom and cattle-prods – there’s a kidnapping thrown in, just to keep things light.
As dark as it is interesting is the life of Arby, sorry, Peter, sorry Pietri (Neil Maskell), who’s now living a cosy two up-two down life with Philomena Cunk off of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe and her daughter. He carries two bags now but neither are for torture – one full of plumber’s tools, the other full of guilt for what he’s done. And if he carried a third bag it’d probably be full of quinoa.
But his domestic rehabilitation is interrupted by an enormous creepy quiff from the past. His ex-torture pal Lee is surprisingly still very alive (didn’t Dennis Kelly tweet that he’d definitely killed Paul Ready’s character?) and after a tremendously creepy speech about dentistry, forces Arby back into the world of spoons and guns.
Like a noose woven from The Bible, all these separate stories soon become twisted together into one deadly cord, in a dramatic, if contrived third act in an abandoned building. Comrades are reunited and strange new unions are formed in a bloody room-to-room romp. There’s the farce of seeing a dead Kevin Eldon being dragged around by Donaldson juxtaposed with Arby’s methodical slaughter of The Network’s armed unit.
It’s utterly insane. Utterly Utopia. A big neon lime-green middle finger to the hushed-voices and loosened Windsor knots of your BBC conspiracy dramas.
This is really how the series should have started. With a bang rather than a flash(back).
Aired at 10pm on Tuesday 15 July 2014 on Channel 4.
> Order Series 2 on DVD on Amazon.
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