‘Down Cemetery Road’ Episode 4 Recap – Things Are Picking Up

I’m often claiming that episodes pick up where the previous one left off, but it’s rarely ever as literal as it is in Down Cemetery Road. There’s barely a second between Sarah picking up the phone at the end of the previous episode and the conversation commencing here in Episode 4, “My Friends Don’t Like Me”. I like the immediacy. It implies there’s no time for messing about, which there isn’t, really, not in an endlessly updating TV climate where falling behind on any show by a week essentially means having to drop it entirely because you’ll never find the time to catch up. If only all shows respected the audience’s time quite this much.

There’s no fussing around with the details, either. Sarah tells Zoe where — and who — she’s with, Zoe sends her the photograph of his former regiment, and Sarah identifies Downey immediately. Easy. Sarah’s also smart enough to have realised that she isn’t in any immediate danger, at least not from Downey, since he saved her from “Rufus” and hasn’t killed her in the interim. Granted, he does snatch the phone off her and angrily destroy it, but that’s more frustration than anything else. And karma catches up to him pretty much immediately, since he collapses.

Sarah is helpful enough to lie to the hotel employee, Sam, about the source of the noise, and give Downey his medication — histropine, which he eventually claims is for a rare neurological condition, but Sarah’s facility with painkillers causes her to Google it from the hotel reception, leading her to an under-construction website and kick-starting a chain of events that summons Amos to the hotel, forcing Sarah and Downey to flee, albeit without their gun, which thanks to a mishap is left behind in the safe.

The only person Sarah knows who might possess spare armaments and wheels is Gerard, who is uncharacteristically ungracious and unhelpful, even after Sarah gives him a brief rundown of the situation over grapes, olives, and some very dry-looking bread. True to form, he tries to sell them out to the police the first chance he gets, but Downey catches him and forces him at sword-point to open his safe full of antique muskets. It’s not exactly a state-of-the-art armoury, but it’ll do. Downey also steals Paula’s BMW, but she’s much more reasonable than her husband, so she even sneaks a bag full of supplies through the window as they leave.

Elsewhere in Down Cemetery Road Episode 4, Zoe forces DI Varma to reopen Joe’s case, but he’s immediately shut down by his superiors, tipping him off that there’s a cover-up afoot. He does Zoe the solid of showing her the autopsy report of the John Doe in the morgue, which was signed off by Dr. Isaac Wright, who technically shouldn’t have had anything to do with it. Zoe pays off a hoodlum to break into his car, luring him out of his consultation room so that she can steal his laptop. She’s caught on the CCTV, though, and an image of her finds its way back to Isaac’s squash partner, who happens to be C. Unsurprisingly, Zoe gets home at the end of “My Friends Don’t Like Me” to find a threatening message daubed on her curtains. Something tells me it won’t dissuade her, though.

And Zoe is, at least for now, the least of C’s problems. With Amos having gone after Downey and Sarah at the hotel, he’s officially rogue, and Hamza — now sporting a fetching neck brace after his previous encounter with Amos — wants authorization to have him killed. For this, he turns to a trio of hired guns he meets in a pub, which is rarely a good sign, and they indeed fail miserably. Amos kills them all and sets his apartment on fire. And he’s still on Dinah’s trail despite Hamza ordering her to be relocated to a different safehouse, since she’s still carrying the blue teddy bear he’s using to track her.

And Another Thing…

• Sam (played memorably by David Moorst) is one of those classic one-off supporting characters who is infinitely more entertaining than he has any real need to be. Some of the funniest visual beats of the episode come from him, such as him sinking in his chair behind reception after Sarah tells him that it’s so high he’ll develop back issues, and the little head tilt of disbelief he does when Sarah asks him, a very obviously gay man, if he has a girlfriend.
• Speaking of funny visual beats, consider Sarah narrating the noisy sex in the adjacent hotel room with a Monster Munch on her finger, and Hamza’s hat blowing off when the helicopter transporting Dinah takes off.
• While Downey is asleep, Sarah locks his gun away in the room safe with the passcode “8008”. Downey’s incredulous “Boob?!” when she tells him is one of the best line readings of the episode.
• Gerard calls Rufus “Just Stop Deodorant”.
• Wayne, the receptionist from the morgue, calls Zoe to let her know that her words have inspired him to hand in his resignation and try streaming full-time. He’s also a hacker on probation, so I suspect we’ll be hearing from him again. Zoe saves his number.

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• Down Cemetery Road Episode 5 Recap