CULT VIEWING (THE THIRD DAY: WINTER)

 

And lo, it came to pass that Sky Atlantic and HBO did squeeze more episodes out for 'The Third Day'.

And they cast Naomie Harris as a mother of three kids.

And taking on the persona of Helen, she did bring two children to the troubled island of Osea.

And those watching these episodes had their blood pressure spike from the off because Osea and children are never a good mix in this cod religious drama.

And lo, Helen, Nico Parker's teen Ellie and Charlotte Gairdner-Mihell's Talulah did travel along the causeway from the Essex mainland to Osea at low tide and they cane upon a house where they hoped to have a holiday to celebrate Ellie's birthday.

And Helen did leave the kids in the car as she went to meet the owners, only to be told the booking was a mistake and it should never have been indicated as being available on the website she used.

And Helen grew very angry, believing she had been refused the booking because of her race.

And when she returned to the car, Ellie and Talulah were thankfully still inside and she insisted that despite this setback she would find them somewhere to stay.

And the family did drive along the island until they happened upon the main village and spied a hotel.

And to Helen's frustration, she was told by the rather disheveled  owner Hilton McRae's Janny that the hotel was also shut, while she treated his bleeding head.

And while this was going on, Ellie and Talulah did bicker and the elder girl wandered out of the car.

And Ellie was drawn to Freya Allan's Kail because she spotted her drop something and decided to alert her to it.

And as she tried to help, she did encounter John Dalgleish's local thug Larry who was his usual charming self.

And Paul Kaye's Stetson wearing character "The Cowboy" did intervene with his Lancashire accent while Helen left the hotel at the same time.

And she did spy Ellie engaging strangers outside the car and began to lose it completely with her eldest daughter.

And so the family continued their trek in search of a holiday letting, spying some weird behaviour among the locals, until they wound up in the local pub run by Paddy Considine and Emily Watson's the Martins.

And lo, Helen was insistent that they give them a warm meal of burgers and a room to spend the night.

And while the family settled in the room over the inn, they heard strange noises.

And Helen did leave her children in the room and told them not to go outside under any circumstances while she checked out what was going on.

And she discovered downstairs the island dwellers had gathered in a state of agitation as Katherine Waterston's Jess was heavily pregnant and in severe pain..

And they did reveal that Jess was in agony because the baby was not sitting right in the womb.

And, taking pity on Jess, Helen offered to help  Jess manipulate the baby back into the right position in the womb, revealing she was a vet but she insisted everyonr turn their backs.

And she did succeed in relieving Jess of her agony and she found herself taking Jess to a beach house to have her child because she could not go to a hospital.

And, in the meantime, Ellie and Talulah did disobey their mother and wander out the bedroom where they encountered Kail.

And she did speak in a rather disconcertiing way of the power of Osea was and how she sensed a connection between Ellie and the island.

And the girls ended up going with their mother to the beach house as she delivered a daughter unto Jess.

And as the final instalment unfolded, it became clear that Helen had not brought them to the island on holiday at all but because of a mysterious email that she had received frkm Osea.

And the audience was very uneasy at everything that subsequently came to pass.

The final three episode run of Felix Barrett and Dennis Kelly's HBO and Sky Atlantic and Sky Arts miniseries was a typically disturbing affair, riffing on Christian parallels in his tale of an English island under the spell of an ancient Celtic faith.

As with 'The Third Day: Summer' and the marathon 12 hour broadcast 'The Third Day: Autumn', the writers of 'The Third Day: Winter' and their director Philippa Lowthorpe referenced movies with the cult madness of Osea increasingly resembling the insanity of Colonel Kurtz's jungle kingdom in 'Apocalypse Now'.

Kit de Waal, Dean O'Loughlin and Dennis Kelly's script for the final three episodes in this ambitious drama saw Katharine Waterston's Jess in particular emerge as a figure to be feared.

But it also played on sectarian division in the island and queried religious belief, as Osea's faithful split over competing beliefs.

A lot rested on the shoulders of Parker, Gairdner-Mihell and particularly Harris as the newcomers to the island to raise fresh questions about the strange cult activity on Osea.

And all three struck the right tone as their characters' mettle was increasingly tested.

Waterston, Dalgleish, Considine and Watson continued to unsettle audiences, along with Mark Lewis Jones' Jason and Amer Chadha-Patel's Preacher from previous episodes.

Allan, McRae and particularly Kaye were effective, eccentric additions to the cast.

And as the disappearance and descent into madness of Jude Law's Sam was revealed, de Waal, O'Loughlin and Kelly's script retained the capacity of the previous instalments to intrigue, repulse and occasionally shock.

David Chizallet's cinematography caught Osea in all its dark, damp and disturbing glory.

And by the time the miniseries reached its overwrought conclusion, it felt oddly satisfying.

'The Third Day' dramas have been some of the most creepy, ambitious and strangely compelling to hit our screens in recent years.

Cleverly scheduled in the build up to Halloween, it benefitted from Law, Considine, Waterston, Harris, Kaye and particularly Emily Watson's nous which kept audiences invested while masking the writers' occasionally heavy handed approach to questioning religious belief.

Barrett and Kelly have kept the door open for a sequel if you have the stomach for a return to Osea.

Having got the formula right this time, casting will be as critical next time around. 

('The Third Day: Winter' was broadcast over three episodes on Sky Atlantic in the UK and Ireland on October 5-19, 2020)