Season 10 - Thérèse Raquin (1980-1981)
Thérèse grew up beside her cousin Camille in his sickbed. When they were older it just made sense for her to stay in the bed and be his wife. She walks through her life in a daze. Nothing ever breaking through the monotony of her day to day existence with Camille and Madame Raquin. The shop bell below their home rings and customers must be served. Every Thursday their friends come over for tea and dominoes. Life plods on. Then one day Camille runs into his old childhood friend Laurent. Laurent's passion is painting, but sadly it can not support him so he's taken a mundane office job. But soon his passion is Thérèse. They begin a torrid affair resulting in the murder of Camille. This three part miniseries starts out rather sedately. The first episode is interesting but it isn't until the second episode, after the murderous denouement of the first, that it becomes something more, something memorable. Kate Nelligan as Thérèse and Brian Cox as Laurent fully embrace the over the top Gothic nature of the tale in such a way that they are mesmerizing. There's a feeling of the darker tales of Edgar Allan Poe when Laurent starts taking to visiting the morgue daily and having his dreams haunted by the dead. Also there's a wonderful unsettled feeling as to what Thérèse's motives were. Did she ever care for Laurent or was he just a means to get ride of her husband? Or did she really not know how her mind would unravel following Camille's death? The height of this is their frantic wedding night. They knew they could never just marry because then perhaps people would wonder what really happened to Camille. So instead, a year after their crime, they have finagled their Thursday night domino friends to insist that the two of them wed, and wed they are. But the haunted honeymoon to come is so deliciously Gothic it almost felt like the Brontes wrote it while taking acid. Laurent is haunted by the painting of Camille he executed that is hanging in the bedroom. He also keeps thinking he sees his dead friend's bloated corpse in their wedding bed. Thérèse is equally frantic. Soon they are beyond miserable, the three of them in the marriage, Thérèse, Laurent, and Camille. All this is happening behind their closed bedroom door while trying to maintain a happy facade for Madame Raquin. But soon that even cracks and tragedy besets tragedy until the scales are balanced.
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