Coming courtesy of Jack and Harry Williams, Boat Story – streaming on the BBC in the U.K. and Freevee everywhere else – is a twisty-turny crime thriller with a healthy dose of eccentricity, which can make it hard to keep track of at times. Luckily, we’ve knocked the events of Episodes 1-6 together into this handy Season 1 recap. You’re welcome.
Episode 1
The premiere of Boat Story introduces a few formal gimmicks – self-referential narration, chapter cards like a silent movie – and the plot basics. After a cold open in which a cop and a drug smuggler kill each other on a boat, the shipwreck is discovered on a beach in Yorkshire by Janet Campbell and Samuel Wells.
Janet has been laid off after losing her hand in an industrial accident and being stiffed out of compensation. Samuel has had to uproot his life and family and take them from London to Applebury because of his gambling addiction – which his wife doesn’t know about. Thus, both of them have a justification to take the ten million quid’s worth of cocaine they find in the boat’s wreckage.
Of course, Janet and Samuel don’t stop to consider who’s looking for the coke, which turns out to be a fearsome crime boss named The Tailor and his semi-psychotic triggerman, Guy.
Episode 2
Boat Story continues to be very meta in its second episode, but also pretty interesting. It hasn’t managed to shake off the Fargo shackles, but it nevertheless has enough of its own identity to be enjoyable.
Weirdness-wise, the main thing is a ridiculous theatrical play-within-a-play that retells Sam and Janet’s story. I’m not especially keen on this kind of thing and it isn’t especially well implemented here either, but whatever. There’s also some funny off-kilter dialogue, like The Tailor discovering what a pasty is.
Speaking of the Tailor and pasties, he meets and immediately falls for a local bakery owner named Pat and begins a sexual relationship with her. Samuel and Janet make efforts to sell the drugs to turn a quick – and major – profit, and Pat’s dorky, seemingly idiotic son Ben takes an interest in the case.
Boat Story | Image via Prime Video
Episode 3
In Episode 3, Janet manages to move the cocaine to Vinnie for a cool few million, but this is also where the Tailor catches up to Sam and Janet. So, before they have a chance to enjoy the spoils, they’re reminded how imperative it is that they give them back.
Meanwhile, the Tailor’s backstory continues to unfurl in the margins of his burgeoning relationship with Pat. He’s factoring her into a complicated and traumatic family backstory, which is never a good basis for a relationship, but it remains funny.
Pat’s son Ben continues to investigate the case despite the higher-ups not paying any attention to him whatsoever, and he has a close moment with Guy without even realizing it. At the end of the episode, the Tailor seems to be on the cusp of killing Janet and Samuel, but they’re saved by Pat accepting his offer of a date.
Episode 4
Janet and Samuel spend almost the entirety of this episode with Guy, while they try and retrieve the Tailor’s money during the 24-hour stay of execution he has given them thanks to being in a good mood about Pat accepting his date. Guy softens a little in these sequences and we learn a bit more about him.
Likewise, we spend more time with the Tailor and Pat, who go on a little excursion to a country pub where the Tailor charms everyone – nobody would ever suspect that the odd little piano-playing Frenchman is a ruthless killer. Well, nobody except Janet and Samuel, anyway.
At the end of the episode, Janet and Samuel try to pull a fast one, and it’s Vinnie who ends up dead in the crossfire. The body count continues to mount, and Janet and Samuel are no closer to being safe.
Boat Story | Image via Prime Video
Episode 5
In the action-packed opening of the penultimate episode, Vinnie and his gang are wiped out following the end of Episode 4, and Janet and Samuel almost meet the same fate. In the scramble, Janet shoots the Tailor, and Guy lets her and Samuel go, seemingly heading off to pursue his pottery dream.
Despite some meandering in the middle of the episode, it builds to a highly significant ending in which poor Ben is killed by Guy, and Pat is kidnapped by Janet and Samuel to use as leverage against the Tailor. This comes after Pat begins to have her doubts about the Tailor’s backstory, which will come up again shortly in the finale.
RIP Ben – he deserved better.
Episode 6
Things get very out there in the Boat Story finale, in a way that’ll probably prove divisive for most viewers. I enjoyed it, all told, but I can see why someone else wouldn’t.
Most of the weirdness isn’t anything to do with Samuel and Janet, who mostly get away with everything – Samuel’s marriage breaks down, to be fair, but he’d been keeping it afloat on a lie since before he found all that cocaine anyway. But the Tailor does seem to have turned over a new leaf because of his relationship with Pat, so he’s willing to swap her for Alan and let bygones be bygones.
However, it turned out that the Tailor was so enamored by Pat because he was trying to reenact the French movie Les Enfants, which he had used to escape into a fantasy world when he was a kid. He would watch the film when his nutcase father would kill people, including his mother. In that film, a young boy becomes infatuated with Madame Bethune and decides to poison, slice up, and eat her, to make her part of him forever. The Tailor has a similar fate in mind for Pat.
Janet stows away aboard the Tailor’s boat and spares Pat this fate. A swift epilogue wraps up some final details, and in a post-credits scene, we meet the narrator in person, who it turns out has been telling the story to a hostage. The connection between the two tales is left deliberately unclear.
You can read an in-depth breakdown of the final episode in our Boat Story Ending Explained article.
That was our recap of Boat Story Season 1. What did you think of the show overall? Let us know in the comments below.
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