Summary
Down Cemetery Road gets off to a pacey start in Episode 1. The shared DNA with Slow Horses is clear to see, but the vibe is different enough for the show to stand on its own.
It’s immediately obvious that Down Cemetery Road shares a lot of DNA and creative personnel with Slow Horses. That show, one of the sharpest arrows in Apple TV+’s quiver, also knew the value of a great opening. Remember the Westacres bombing in Season 4? What about the Abbotfield massacre in Season 5? The local equivalent here in Episode 1 is the explosion of a residential property in sleepy South Oxford. The key difference is that the dinner it interrupted was even more horrifying.
This is a comedy until it isn’t, but it’s still pretty funny even then. The little English nook where the explosion takes place is a writhing mass of cliches, from hippies named Wigwam and Rufus to smirking banking bigwigs named Gerard who have all the opinions you’d expect them to have about the state of the country. In that crowd, Sarah Trafford doesn’t quite fit in. She’s an art restorer who wears her disdain for people like Gerard on her sleeve, but her husband, Mark, is very much a schmoozer, so she has to tolerate it. From that point of view, the explosion is something of a reprieve.
But why would someone blow up a house in a no-account university town with a mother and her young child inside it? Well, this is the hook of “Almost True”, since Sarah becomes peculiarly invested in the case, at least in part because the attempts at a cover-up are so obvious she can’t help but ask questions. When she tries to deliver a handmade “get well soon” card to Dinah, the little girl who survived the blast, she’s stonewalled at the hospital and the police station in a way that is deeply uncharacteristic of a tragic gas main explosion, which is what the event is being portrayed as in the press. And then the photos being circulated turn out to have been doctored to obscure Dinah’s survival and, well… we’ve got a conspiracy on our hands.
This is what leads Sarah to Oxford Investigations, a struggling husband-and-wife detective agency, where she meets Zoe Boehm and Joe Silvermann, the only people besides her who seem to take any of the claims even halfway seriously. To be fair, Episode 1 of Down Cemetery Road doesn’t exactly keep the culprits of this atrocity under wraps. We know whodunit immediately — a maniac called Amos who’s working for an idiot named Hamza Malik in the Intelligence & Threats department of the Ministry of Defense. Hamza’s boss, C., is trying to keep the whole thing under wraps, hence all the deliberate obfuscation. The fun question isn’t “who”. It’s “why”.
We don’t come any closer to finding this information out in “Almost True”, which is fine, since we wouldn’t have as series to enjoy if we did. It’s all about the thrill of the chase instead, about turning over the pieces that don’t fit and trying to slot them somewhere more accommodating. Dinah’s mother, Maddie, didn’t seem to be anyone special, but who’s her father? What is the Ministry of Defense up to that requires bombing a house and stealing a child? What is up with Sarah’s husband, Mark, and what is he getting into that prompts even someone as self-serving as Gerard to give Sarah a heads-up? These questions and presumably more are still to be answered.
Towards the end, Down Cemetery Road takes a welcome turn into much more serious territory. Joe heads down to the pub to charm a few nurses into giving away what’s really going on with Dinah. He turns up the usual spiel about her being in the ICU due to smoke inhalation, but he also uncovers that she’s due to be moved to an unknown destination. The audience knows that this is C. having told Hamza to instruct Amos to get her out of the way, whatever the risks to her health might be. But Sarah doesn’t. She heads to the hospital and starts following the suspicious man she has seen lurking around since the night of the explosion, who, it’s worth noting, is not Amos. Whatever his connection to Dinah is, it’s yet to be revealed, but I have my suspicions.
In the meantime, Sarah sets the fire alarm off to try and catch Dinah on the way out. She sees her being loaded into the back of a car and taken away, but when she gives chase on her pushbike, she’s quickly knocked down, and Dinah gets away. Sarah rushes to Oxford Investigations to tell Joe that he was right, but finds him dead at his desk, having apparently slashed his wrists with a straight razor. Things are already heating up, which, in a show about an explosion, I suppose is fair enough.
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