Summary
One bombshell after another tees up a potentially disastrous finale for everyone, not least Dan and Emily, who stand to lose the one thing they wanted.
This recap of The Nest Season 1 Episode 4 contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
It’s all getting rather complicated in BBC One’s surrogacy thriller The Nest, and in ways that most people weren’t expecting. That’s usually the sign of a good bit of primetime telly, and ahead of tonight’s Easter Monday finale, let’s take a minute to unpack some of the bizarre shenanigans we witnessed last night.
While still ostensibly about Dan (Martin Compston), Emily (Sophie Rundle), and “their” thus far nameless new-born, The Nest Episode 4 dispensed some bombshells with a particularly dramatic yield for all involved – even those on the periphery. And with a last-minute cliffhanger which threatens to upend the happy-ish status quo that Dan and Emily believed they’d finally arrived at, the finale doesn’t seem to provide much hope of a happy ending for anyone.
For a start, Dan and Emily are £50,000 out of pocket for the surrogacy, and another £20,000 down after Kaya (Mirren Mack) needed an incentive to agree to a DNA test. All that, and the test reveals that the nipper isn’t biologically theirs anyway, despite Kaya having been apparently impregnated with their safely stored embryo. But while we’re supposed to assume that the baby’s daddy is actually Kaya’s ill-fated junkie neighbour Doddy (Paul Brannigan), the DNA test quickly reveals that isn’t the case either – the baby has no biological connection to Kaya. There has clearly – and this is something of an understatement – been a bit of a mix-up.
Perhaps just as well, since Doddy was an unsavoury sort, to begin with, and was, you’ll recall, dredged up from the bottom of the Clyde. The Nest Episode 4 finally revealed who killed him, and it wasn’t Kaya, or Dan, or Dan’s henchman, whom he sent to have a word in his ear when a bribe didn’t throw him off the surrogacy scent. It’s James (James Harkness) who’s most culpable, but not quite in the way people thought he might be. Turns out he’d been revealing protected personal information to drug gangs, he claims in exchange for cash, and Doddy’s name and address ended up in the notebook of a triggerman type who killed him to settle his debt. Oops.
That leaves Kaya off the hook, legally speaking, but also completely alone, having been betrayed by the only person in the world that she trusted. Who else does she have to turn to, then, but her estranged mother, who arrives like a grim spectre and hovers over her shoulder, whispering about new beginnings and second chances. All of a sudden, motherhood seems an enticing prospect. And she remains the legal custodian of the baby who belongs to nobody – the baby that Dan and Emily had finally decided to adopt as their own. With their biological child presumably adrift in Ukraine, and this one now in the care of a child murderer and her clearly manipulative mother, are they going to end the series childless? Or perhaps something worse?
