While Series 2 has lost much of the obliqueness of its predecessor – and there is no doubt that Utopia this year has used its torture spoon to feed you plot rather than push perplexities in your eye – the fact there are fewer questions has left greater space to admire performance of its talented cast.
People such as Ian McDiarmid, who has been consistently intriguing as Anton/Philip/an impersonation of a dirty mop; one minute gibbering like a toddler sitting on top of a tumble dryer, the next so smooth and cold and eloquent you could stick him in your G&T. Episode 5 is his limelight moment, as he flits between lunacy and insight on the moors, like King Lear with a PhD.
Just as you’re accustomed to his brand of benign senility, he shoots at his son and daughter, and you realise that the mysteries this series are more personal, emotional, rather than globally conspiratorial. It’s that dimension that has allowed the space for performance.
Last week’s episode was all about tearing family apart. This week it’s all about reuniting it. Dugdale’s rescue of his family is a dark screwball farce from the moment he wedges a mobile up his bum; a reunion that is comic relief against that of the Carvel family’s catastrophe of a reconciliation. It was The Jeremy Kyle Show in a field. With guns.
And it wouldn’t be a family reunion without at least one bombshell. McDiarmid’s delivery of it is chillingly forthright. JANUS will leave Romas fertile, which is one in the eye for History, given Romas were slaughtered by the Nazis and then systematically sterilised by the Czechs after the war. Not only that, it also stops the Russian flu vaccine from working. Only Roma will be protected. Everyone else will either be sterile or dead. UKIP will be furious.
Sticking it to Nigel Farage, Milner gives the JANUS dispersal the go-ahead, just before being shot by Grant, who’s as good with a gun as he is at being an annoying little git. And somewhere in England, a man called Terrance (Being Human’s Steve Robertson, always a pleasure to see), calmly walks out of his fast food job, his life, and coolly, efficiently, prepares to kill millions. Looks like Humanity’s had its chips.
Hey, speaking of chips, we couldn’t let you go without mentioning perhaps THE performance of the episode: the dead Romanian translator from last week dipping a chip in his head wound and demanding Becky eat it. A moment of sublime WTF-ery to prevent you from getting too comfortable, too close to Utopia.
This is a show that keeps you at arm’s length with insanity.
Aired at 10pm on Tuesday 5 August 2014 on Channel 4.
> Order Series 2 on DVD on Amazon.
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