'Broadchurch' Postmortem: Inside the Fair and the Furnace

Spoiler alert! The fifth episode of Broadchurch's second season saw Ellie (Olivia Colman) and Hardy (David Tennant) heat up their investigation into the Sandbrook case, Hardy ask Jocelyn (Charlotte Rampling) to draw up his will after another episode with his heart, and Susan (Pauline Quirke) get destroyed at Joe's trial and leave town again.

Below, we continue our weekly debriefings with Broadchurch executive producer Jane Featherstone.

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This episode had some of the show’s darkest imagery, which we’ll get to, but also some of the funniest lines. I’m thinking of the two scenes with Fred: When Ellie ribs Hardy for having a carnival behind his house (“Oh, bumper cars, Hardy!” “Oh, Fred, we could go on the tea cups, couldn’t we? We could take Uncle Alec!”), and when we actually see Hardy pushing Fred’s stroller after Ellie’s been up all night working at his place. Why are those scenes important?
First, it locates them in the community, and it’s quite funny. It’s a wonderful, incidental throwaway on that wide shot of, like, “Oh, you didn’t know there’d be a carnival behind your house.” So that was a pleasure, and it’s a little laugh at Hardy’s expense, but we love them more for that, I think. And then pushing the baby, it’s just so unlikely, but somehow, it just bonds these two together in their platonic friendship. Also, you start to explore Hardy more as a parent from here on. You meet his ex-wife and then you meet his daughter, and so you start to see… there must have been a time when he was pushing a buggy a lot. So it’s all of those things as well, I think.

Susan continued to testify in this episode. With so much of the season set in court, what was the key to keeping that part of the story captivating?
That’s Chris’s writing that does that. He is brilliant at writing those scenes. An awful lot of research went in as Chris develops and writes those scenes to make them authentic, to be what the defense and the prosecution and the British court would do. Also, it’s very important — and this is key for Chris right from the beginning — that the characters of Jocelyn and Sharon each lived in their own rights, absolutely from the beginning of this series, so that when you’re in court, not only are you literally just waiting on the details of the testimony, but you are also with them as characters. What will happen to Jocelyn if she doesn’t achieve this? She needs a peak now, she needs to win, because otherwise, she’s in trouble as a character and therefore, we might lose the case against Joe. So Chris just kept twisting and turning it, bringing in things that you thought were a given in many ways and suddenly turning them on their head. He gave each of the defense and prosecution, as happens in a real trial, moments of success and then moments of disappointment, and you had to just keep on your toes. But a lot of that is based on research and legal expertise from some very senior barristers in this country.

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Did you like seeing Susan get torn down in court?
Well, I think it’s a complex set of emotions isn’t it, because anyone on the stand, once you understand a little bit about why she is like she is… But she’s clearly lying, and she is in contempt of court. So yes, in terms of justice, you have to be pleased with that happening. But because that’s followed by the baby photo moment, I think you genuinely feel empathy for her and some sadness and guilt that she has suffered in this way.

There’s that moment in this episode where Ellie tells Claire (Eve Myles), as she and Hardy are informally grilling Claire, that there are no secrets between her and Hardy. Ellie really does believe that?
I think she totally believes that. First of all, I doubt she thinks Hardy has any secrets to keep. I don’t think she believes that he does and actually, he doesn’t, really, have any secrets to keep like that. There may be things that by omission he hasn’t fully declared, because he’s embarrassed or ashamed or something, but she’s sort of right about that. Obviously Claire’s intuiting something different into that.

Ellie wondered if Lisa might have killed Pippa and still be alive, since Lisa’s phone was on long after Pippa’s presumed time of death and its signal was last triangulated in Portsmouth. That’s where they discovered Thorp Agriservices (a name Ellie had found in the case files) had furnaces used to burn animals. That’s pretty dark.
On a production level, it was one of those things that was a bit of a challenge to achieve for Rich Stokes, the producer, and the team — finding somewhere that was the right place to do it. Chris had a location in his head, which was a real place, a real furnace where animals were burned, but using that for real was obviously quite complicated.

Then, we said, “Well, maybe we have to build it,” and building it was very expensive and quite difficult for what wasn’t a huge scene. So in the end, we did build it in a warehouse somewhere. And then, there were [discussions] about the fire: How much fire could we have? So it was all a bit of a palaver, but it’s a great moment, I think, them going through that warehouse and finding that furnace. It’s a real creepy, great hook [laughs] but yeah, it was a complicated thing to do.

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Broadchurch airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on BBC America.