'Passenger' Premiere: Welcome to Chadder Vale
Welcome to Chadder Vale, a remote town surrounded by forest in the Lancashire hills (that’s The North, for those readers & viewers who aren’t full sickos on the topic of UK geography)! Sure, Chadder Vale experiences unexplained cold snaps seemingly year-round; the forest is extremely menacing and full of eviscerated stags; a hapless young bread delivery guy is terrified to drive his route when tasked with moving a weird, oily black goo along with his loaves; and there’s a mystical tree just outside town that draws tourists from as far away as Scandinavia and the US. Welcome to Passenger.
Everyone in town and on the police force seems oddly blithe about the disappearances of two young women (Katie Wells did reappear a day later, at least, but DS Riya Ajunwa has questions, and so do I); and everyone is up in arms about the unexpectedly early return of a convicted murderer to their midst, and naturally, that murderer is also Katie’s father. Whew! Yeah, so, ok, Chadder Vale is a small town with a lot of residents embroiled in some weird, unexplained phenomena and, occasionally, crimes, but it is absolutely, positively not Twin Peaks.
The first two episodes pack in a ton of exposition and character development, and all of the narrative threads crisscross and entwine, so this week, I will focus on disentangling those threads. As is often the case with the first season of complex stories, my viewer experience with Passenger improved markedly on rewatch – relationships between characters snapped into clearer focus, and the weird stuff shifted from mildly confusing to quite intriguing. As I write this, I’ve only watched the first two episodes, so there’s no risk of me spoiling events in the remaining three in this recap.
