'Unforgotten' Season 6's Midpoint Starts Bringing Up the Bodies

The problem with Unforgotten is that it often tries to cram too many elements into any given case. That was the problem with that initial first season, it wasn't just the 1970s economic situation; it wasn't just a toxic marriage, or closeted gay man who made himself paraplegic in a desperate attempt to stop his urges, or postpartum psychosis, it was all of it, with some 1970s nationalism and a random priest with a hidden love child dumped on top. Most seasons find a balance within their random topical morass, or narrow it down to one overarching horror that begets smaller ones. But Season 5 collapsed under its own weight, and Season 6 is starting to teeter-totter.

Episode 4 is traditionally when a second body turns up, which leads — either directly or indirectly — to a break in the case. (Season 5 was the only one where the body didn't show up until the penultimate episode, bogged down under the weight of everything else it was carrying.) This season, it seems like there are many extraneous deaths already, but at least one, it turns out, is directly connected: Marty's father died of COVID in February 2021, because Mr. Cooper told Marty the vaccine was a hoax. Marty believed him, so he convinced his parents not to risk it.

Poor Marty, it's clear he blames himself for what happens (which only makes his resulting submergence in the manosphere even sadder). However, it does suddenly hand him a motive. Far more importantly, it gives his mother, Dot, a motive; clearly, she knows something if she's trying to keep Marty from talking about it.

(To be honest, I don't think Marty did it, and the series has shown little to suggest he's anything more than a red herring so far.)

I also want to be clear, as Jess and Sunny drive out to interview Asif, that I absolutely do not think he did it. Unforgotten always has one suspect whose entire life is turned upside down because they made a single bad call in relation to the victim, and it exposes some unrelated secret they've tried to keep hidden. They are usually also granted some measure of forgiveness by their loved ones, though not always. (Think Season 2's Sara Mahmoud in terms of the former, Season 5's Karol Wojski for the latter.) 

It's not clear yet which way the cards will fall for Asif, but either way, I highly doubt he'll turn out to be our primary murderer. However, he may have looked the other way when he accidentally found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. We already know he understands that sometimes the law and justice are very different things.

Of course, Asif doesn't help himself in the slightest because he's terrified of what they might find, especially with Hassan currently in residence. He lies badly, claiming he doesn't remember the family and that he would have had no reason to see Cooper after his contract with the council ended in September 2020. However, he does reveal a form of truth when asked about seeing landlords like Cooper mistreating his fellow immigrants. "If I got angry every time," he says, "I'd be in a permanent state of rage, D.I. Khan." 

Obviously. When Sam comes home and says he'll compromise if Hassan moves out, Asif declares that this is treating him like a child, ordering him around. He then emotionally blackmails Sam into letting Hassan stay by stating his only choice if he doesn't like it is to call the police. (I believe the current meme for this would be "Some men would prefer to illegally smuggle their friends out of Afghanistan than go to therapy.") Not that it matters, the British version of ICE arrives at the farm before Hassan has left for the day, so the point of where he'll be staying tonight (or any night henceforth) is probably moot.

Melinda is a far more likely suspect, and not just because MyAnna Burning is well known on both sides of the pond. (If we're going to assume that route, Victoria Hamilton is right there.) Her television smooth reaction to local Garda Joe Kane (Louis Dempsey) asking if she'd be willing to hop on a Zoom call from their local station will be shown up as rubbish the moment Jess and Sunny's team pull up those phone records and her internet search history. 

Not that we have to wait, her story's exposed as rubbish during the call itself; Kane's face when it's over shows he wasn't fooled. He knows when the suspect's lying just as well as Jess and Sunny do, and the story Melinda just told has holes big enough to drive his lorry through. 

While Melida rushes home to accidentally burn her diary from 2021 so that she isn't able to find it for the cops (but not before looking up that she had indeed written down "Gerry" in large letters on the afternoon of his disappearance), those phone records are already having a highlighter taken to them. The relationship carried on for nearly five years. She tried to end it around the end of 2020, and 2021 only has him texting her, alternately threatening to kill her if she leaves and begging her to meet and "discuss the amount." I guess loan sharks weren't the only ones Gerry took money from. 

Too bad they only pulled the phone records to 2021, I'd love to know what Jess and Sunny would think if they discovered she was drunkenly leaving Juliet messages threatening her if this gets out. ("What if they met?" Sunny asks Jess, unaware he's almost certainly hit upon the key to the case. With apologies to his former boss, he didn't even need to follow a suspect as they drove to the farthest pub in the middle of nowhere to put it together.) Maybe the team will find it while Sunny flies out to Cork, and Jess deals with her impending divorce.

Speaking of Victoria Hamilton, Jess and Sunny might be off questioning everyone else right now, but Juliet's facing a far more brutal inquisition at home from Taylor. Instead of being packed back off to school and safety, she skips the train and waits in the library when Mum arrives home, demanding to know if her mother realizes she is a human being with eyeballs and a brain who had lived 13 years of her life with them by that point. Julet can lie to the cops all she wants, but Taylor was there that night and knows far more about this than her mother seems to be giving her credit for.

(As if Juliet isn't already having a bad enough day, she's also gotten the university's version of the polite layoff, "early retirement." RIF solidarity.)

It is perhaps a slight nod back to Season 5's finale, where the young child who had been in the house that night was the key witness, that Jess' wish to have been a fly on the wall in the Cooper house brings Sunny to ask about the possibility of interviewing Taylor. The school doesn't tell Jess that Taylor never returned after her suspension (the headmistress may not be aware of that yet). Instead, they put the police off, saying they'll need to consult their solicitors about this highly irregular request. 

However, Juliet is already a step ahead of everyone, arriving at the station to tell Jess that Taylor has now told her Marty broke into their house a week before Gerry's disappearance.

At this point, the series has all but made it clear that Marty is an odd duck and unaware of his own physical strength, but the chances of him having done it continue to be low. His college habit of breaking into people's rooms in hopes of finding a friend echoes this behavior. Juliet may think she's found a person to pin this on and make it go away with Taylor's story, but the conclusion actually all but exonerates the kid, since Taylor made him promise not to hurt her dad because it would make her sad.

It's a bad scene all around right now. Well-meaning people have told Murray about Asif's heroic work on behalf of his clients, which inadvertently puts the lie to his not being able to remember one case from another. The episode ends with him being picked up by cops and swabbed for DNA while Sam panics. (It's about to get worse; they don't even know Hassan's been captured yet.) 

Next week is going to be packed as the show hits its penultimate episode. Poor Sunny's been given the "I'll call you" brush-off by Leanne, and then sent to another country (again!) to chase down an inconveniently located suspect — a great callback to him deliberately going to France to spite Jess last season. We'll also be treated to Jess throwing her absolute weasel of a husband out on his arse. 

(Raise your hand if you thought Jess was saying she wasn't able to go with Sunny to Ireland because she's about to throw out her ugly, emotionally abusive weasel, husband, and that made her too emotionally compromised to interview a suspect who the victim abused.)

Meanwhile, Juliet is here pointing the finger at Marty.... just as his mom has overdosed on some medication, and Marty's (understandable but absolutely wrongheaded) response has been to barricade the house in terror of her being taken away. One might think Juliet's just gotten the luckiest break in her life; Marty's actions will probably get him tossed in the slammer by the local police, who don't understand ASD, and just made it deeply easy to pin this one on him, too.

However, the world, as Juliet should have realized by now, has changed. Some of what the 2020s have ushered in is genuinely horrific. (Support your local PBS station, sign up for PBS Passport.) Most of it is just the same old stuff in a different outfit, amplified by our own anxiety as a species. However, despite the change we were supposed to be never materializing, there has been slow, incremental, generational progress. Marty Bains, as a character — and Maximilian Fairley playing him — would have been unimaginable 25 years ago. Marty Bains as the murderer would have been the obvious fear-mongering conclusion in 2015, the year Unforgotten debuted.

But the world is a better place now, and that goes for Juliet and Melinda, too, who the show has Jess and Sunny framing as possible victims themselves in "coercive controlling" relationships with Gerry. Perhaps the arc of the universe does bend towards justice, but it's going to take a lot of jumping up and down on it before we get there. Let's hope it's bent enough for these four people to get on with trying to live through it.

Unforgotten Season 6 continues with new episodes every Sunday at 10 p.m. ET on most local PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel. All six episodes are available for members as a binge drop via PBS Passport. As always, check your local listings. 

Unforgotten Seasons 1 through 5 are available to stream on PBS Passport for members. Season 7 is already greenlit.