'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.

Here’s who’s who and what’s (maybe) what in Chadder Vale so far:

Katie Wells (Rowan Robinson), a young bookkeeper at the local bread factory who dreams of city life, goes missing for about 24 hours after trying to drive home through the Chadder Forest one night and comes home with a really nasty, chesty cough. When the police come across her abandoned car, the scene includes a stag missing several internal organs and strewn with mysterious black goo, but not Katie or her friend Mehmet (Shervin Alenabi), who she’d been driving home from the pub the night before. Her cough notwithstanding, she’s got plans for a life somewhere else and is looking forward to an interview with a company in Manchester. Things could be looking up for her!

Mehmet wakes up at home, his pillow covered in blood and his hungover mind bereft of memories. Once conscious, he’s up to all sorts, surreptitiously transferring £6,000 from his mother’s bank account to his own, obsessively playing a video game that may or may not be connected to the weird goings-on in the woods, and preparing some anti-fracking caper with a friend. 

He and Katie are friends in a way Katie and John (Mehmet’s BFF and Katie’s boyfriend) are not, and while he’s very bright and could pursue a career and life elsewhere, he feels obliged to stay in Chadder to help at his mother’s fish-and-chip shop. Unfortunately, his anti-fracking caper goes extremely sideways, and his corpse is discovered at the fracking site by DS Riya Ajunwa (Wunmi Mosaku).

Riya is our main POV character and is a natural at policing, the kind of officer that any department should value – she’s got great instincts, knows and cares about her community, has a solid grasp of correct procedure (and when it’s probably ok to circumvent it a tiny bit), and does her best to mentor the two young trainee officers at her station, Nish Chowdry (Arian Nik) and Alison Day (Emma Bruccoleri). Although Riya is a Northerner, too, she’s not a native Chadder gal. She had an impressive career in the London Metropolitan Police Service and wound up in Chadder Vale because her husband, Nick, wanted to live closer to his mother, Susan. 

Nick disappeared (she believes has abandoned her; I have my suspicions), leaving Riya stuck with Susan, who needs daily care now that she’s experiencing daily episodes of panic and paranoia (again, I have my suspicions – what if Susan’s episodes aren’t delusional at all? What if she and Riya are Chadder Vale’s Cassandras?). Riya doesn’t for one moment accept the pat explanations for Nina and Katie’s disappearances everyone else finds satisfying: Nina skipped town without paying her bill at the B&B? So? Tourists do that all the time! Katie was missing, but it was for under 24 hours, and she’s home now, so what’s the big deal? 

This stultifying lack of curiosity makes her feel like she’s losing touch with reality, and even worse, her superior officer, Chief Constable Linda Markel (Jo Hartley), doesn’t appreciate the unassigned investigation she’s undertaking about Nina. It’s one thing for the PCs to act a little callow and lackadaisical about it, but they’re still very green. But Linda declaring “This isn’t Twin Peaks” as she brandishes a flyer about an annual beautiful village contest? Maybe Chadder isn’t Twin Peaks, but it’s starting to seem an awful lot like the village in Hot Fuzz, which is way funnier but not remotely comforting! Come on! 

The early release of local ne’er-do-well Eddie Wells (Barry Sloane) also brings local tempers to a boil. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for the murders of the family of Jim Bracknell (David Threlfall). Jim is the manager-protector of the fracking site and, like Susan, seems unable to fully distinguish between reality as everyone else experiences it and visions that may be his alone. He’s incensed and scared at the prospect of Eddie’s return, relies on heroin to manage his feelings, and I have to wonder about what if any, role he played in Mehmet’s death. 

It’s not just Jim and Riya feeling the ripple effects of Eddie’s return. His arrival in town throws a wrench into the works of nearly everyone else’s lives. His wife and daughters are fearful and defiant by turns; Yakub (Hubert Hanowicz), the philosophical Polish mechanic who’s taken over Eddie’s garage, is sympathetic to everyone, including Eddie, to a point. Boxing hall owner Tony unloads a heap of ferocious invective at Eddie when he appears at The Carvery (perhaps another nod to Twin Peaks and its Double-R Diner?). 

Eddie himself seems far more lost than scary: he accepted his sentence five years ago, partly because he didn’t have any memory of the time frame in which Jim’s family was murdered. Being incarcerated doesn’t seem to have turned him into a more hardened criminal, but he hasn’t processed or come to atone for his presumed crimes because he has no memories of what happened.

I’m hooked and have many, many questions going into next week’s episodes.

• How did Mehmet die? Was it an accident or foul play? Either way, who saw it happen?
• How long is Katie going to survive with that cough? She seems to be weakening quickly, and I’m concerned that her upcoming day trip to Manchester will also lead to the black goo making the leap to one of the UK’s most populous metropolitan areas. 
• What exactly happened to poor Jim’s family? He’s clearly a shell of the person he used to be, and suffering terribly.
• We need more details about what’s got future Lancashire Businessman of the Year Derek Jackson (Daniel Ryan) and his stepbrother Kane so deeply rattled. The black goo is bad enough that Kane wears a gas mask to open the compartment of the bread van where it’s housed – and he doesn’t even know that it’s prone to boiling over when confined, as happens when police pathologist Terry (who is also Derek’s ex-wife and Kane’s former sister-in-law) attempts to store a sample in her lab. I haven’t seen a face go so white at the mention of “waste management” since the last time I watched The Sopranos. 
• When is Riya going to listen more attentively to Susan’s apparent ravings, and when will someone listen to Riya, in turn? 

Passenger continues with two episodes a week on Thursdays through October 31, 2024.