Summary
Get Millie Black Episode 1 isn’t an easy watch, granted. But it feels like an important one; a potent start to a series that evidently has a lot to say.
Get Millie Black had me in the first two minutes of Episode 1. It’s not just the narration, which is compelling. It’s the show’s entire demeanor, a kind of mean-spirited forthrightness that sets the scene. Even if you don’t necessarily buy into the present-day case out of the gate, there’s a tone to the whole thing that’s immediately captivating.
I’m not sure “flashbacks” is the right word for those earliest scenes; it’s more like a montage, or even a fever dream, giving a general sense of protagonist Millie-Jean Black’s backstory in Jamaica. Growing up, she painted her brother Orville’s toenails, and their mother beat him, snarling slurs. Millie intervened, so her mother sent her away to England. Orville was left behind.
Years later, Millie’s mother told her that Orville had died in a riot after fleeing to the impoverished storm drains housing Kingston’s ostracised LGBTQ+ population. She was lying, though – after her sudden death, Orville is revealed to be alive, and Millie returns to Jamaica to join the Kingston police force and look out for “Orville”, who is now a transwoman named Hibiscus.
This isn’t it for texture. Jamaica is rabidly antagonistic towards the LGBTQ+ community – homosexuality is illegal. But Millie is supportive of Hibiscus and her partner, Curtis, a gay man secretly living with his boyfriend, Daniel. It’s all background to the main case, which is the search for a missing teenage girl, but it all intersects fairly consistently, as we’ll see.
The teenager is Janet Fenton, a once-model student who has fled from her Catholic school, apparently with a boy who drives a swanky car. Her mother, Ruth, is largely uninterested, implying she could be a prostitute. She does indeed have a connection to a strip club called the Hot Pinky, where a dancer tells Millie that Janet has been sleeping with the proprietor, Freddie Somerville, a rich white man from a prodigious family who has a taste for young “ghetto” girls.
In case it wasn’t obvious, there’s a very obvious upstairs/downstairs – or, more accurately, uptown/downtown – dynamic to Get Millie Black Episode 1. There are clear haves and have-nots; those who’re accepted and those who are violently marginalized. Hibiscus falls into the latter category; she’s treated despicably by the police when she’s arrested and Millie has to bribe her way out. Curtis would too, if he was ever outed. Freddie and his family, who don’t take kindly to the police poking around, are very much privileged and upper-class.
Tamara Lawrance and Joe Dempsie in Get Millie Black | Image via HBO
Somerville Snr isn’t afraid to leverage this either. Millie is unafraid to push back, but she’s playing in a rigged system – no sooner has she interviewed the man than her boss has reprimanded her for doing so. Imagine if he knew that she was encouraging the staff – who suspect Janet might have been pregnant – to spit in the lemonade.
Pretty shortly after, Freddie turns up dead. Or maybe not. The corpse has been beaten so violently that it’s virtually unrecognizable. Millie notes the lack of a tell-tale earring, theorizing that Freddie killed his attacker and fled, leaving the body behind. New arrival Luke Holborn, a white detective from Scotland Yard, isn’t immediately inclined to agree.
Why would Scotland Yard be interested in “colonizing the case”, as Millie puts it? Freddie is a witness to a crime in Blighty and needs to be kept alive for the trial, so the stakes are even higher than they would have been otherwise. If someone is out to kill Freddie, that piques the interest of Scotland Yard and, by extension, the Kingston police, pushing Janet down the list of priorities.
Millie and Curtis aren’t having this, obviously, and track Freddie and Janet down to a house in the hills. When they get there, though, they find only Janet, and shortly after a crew of armed assassins who open fire on the property. Curtis gets shot, nonfatally, and Millie is able to force them off, but it’s a chaotic close to an opening episode, and that’s not even taking into account the vicious, bigoted beating that Hibiscus’s friend Deltreece is subjected to, for no reason at all.
This show isn’t pulling any punches, that’s for sure.
