‘Get Millie Black’ Offers A Smart Change Of Perspective In Episode 2

It’s official – Get Millie Black is really good. It was obvious after the premiere but Episode 2, which valuably switches perspective to better hone in on Hibiscus’s headspace, proves it beyond a reasonable doubt. This isn’t just a crime drama. It’s a portrait of a community teeming with injustice and bristling with righteous anger and frustration, and it speaks with a frightening sense of authenticity.

You see it in the minor scenes and exchanges, mostly, like Daniel not being allowed to see Curtis in the hospital because the nurse won’t recognize his status as “family”. Millie’s right to be indignant about this, calling out the bigotry where she sees it, but Daniel’s also right that she should have better protected Curtis. Her ability to move through the world unmolested, at least relative to people like Daniel and Curtis, should confer a greater sense of responsibility on her to do so mindfully (Daniel doesn’t say this outright, but it’s implied.)

It’s through Hibiscus’s narration that a viewpoint crystallizes. Her life as a sex worker seems awful, but she deliberately diverts sympathy: “Better to be Hibiscus here than Orville everywhere else.” This is the key. Millie might be accepting of her sister in a broad sense, but she still sees her as a victim, someone who needs looking after, who needs saving from her circumstances. Hibiscus’s counterpoint is that these are the circumstances she chose. It was the price she paid to live as herself.

Millie’s righteousness manifests at work, too. She wants to be the one to interrogate Janet because Stennet’s approach is too aggressive, which is fair enough, but she also has a tendency to undercut her colleagues and pursue her own ends. She gets little out of Janet except for some vague comments about running errands for rich people and a very suspicious look when she mentions the kids’ clothes. Naturally, Millie wants to pursue that lead, adamant that Janet is protecting a boy that nobody has identified yet. Holborn and, by extension, Barracat, want to focus on the connection to Freddie to keep Scotland Yard happy.

It is, of course, Hibiscus who reshapes Millie’s perspective. Even her worry about whether Curtis will be alright seems small against Hibiscus’s cool acknowledgment that Deltreece won’t be; the beating killed her. They’re both in their mother’s house during this exchange, and the space affects them. Hibiscus hates it; it’s a reminder of everything that their mother put her through. Her description of allowing their mother to die is a powerful sequence; her last living act was to try and reflexively beat Hibiscus with a belt, only failing because she was too weak to do so. Hibiscus never experienced anything from her but hatred. The house still holds that scorn and her mother’s lashing voice rattles around it in the quiet.

Tamara Lawrance in Get Millie Black | Image via HBO

Hibiscus believes the house is haunted, and from her perspective it is. She wants Millie to sell it, which she refuses to do initially, instead focusing on the case. But you can tell this is close to another form of abandonment. Millie isn’t treating the amount of trauma Hibiscus has bundled up in that house with the appropriate weight. Her work has clearly become a coping mechanism ever since she was sent to England. And it continues to be that now she’s home.

But it’s hard to deny that she’s right about the case. Get Millie Black Episode 2 scares up some crucial leads, including the revelation that there is indeed a nine-year-old boy named Romeo Lawrence involved. Romeo was whisked from the underprivileged kids’ program mid-term on a scholarship to a school that it’s subsequently revealed doesn’t exist. Its supposed administrator, Miss Maxwell, was Janet, as revealed in a video that Romeo’s mother sends to Millie.

With this smoking-gun evidence, even Barracat can’t deny that Janet is involved. She and Holborn, who has an unusual amount of knowledge about Millie’s past, head to the Somerville estate where Janet is staying as a “house guest” after being whisked away by the family lawyer earlier, and find the entire family and the cook, Marva, shot dead. Both Freddie and Janet are missing.

At around the same time, Millie’s friction with Hibiscus comes to a head in a messy, destructive fight that echoes the one in their past which led to their separation in the first place. Millie ends it by agreeing to sell the house, but Hibiscus isn’t consoled; it feels like a placatory gesture, not someone having really turned the corner in understanding someone else’s point of view.

There’s a little callousness in how Millie’s only visit to Curtis is for the purpose of going over the case with him, which doesn’t go unremarked upon. But Curtis, like Millie, feels driven to right the injustice in Romeo’s disappearance, so they break into Mr Somerville’s phone together and find multiple deleted photos of Romeo. The entire family seems to have been involved.