Richard Hillman Drives Gail, Sarah-Louise, David and Little Baby Bethany into the Weatherfield Canal
Rhys Owain Williams
It’s almost 9pm on a Wednesday and Richard and family are listening to The Wannadies in the car. It's them out there that want to hurt us he says, the people carrier thick with power pop and exhaust fumes. The gagged Hillman-Platts can’t answer, Sarah-Louise fumbling in the back seat for her mother’s nail file. Don’t fight it, just relax. This is Richard’s coup de grâce. The Street’s first serial killer—Norman Bates with a briefcase, slick as the Lancashire cobbles. Best-laid plans unravelling now, though, like a pair of cheap Baldwin-factory knickers. He’s decided familicide will be his last act before the credits roll. But Nanna Audrey’s on the case like Columbo, whips open the garage doors faster than a highest-setting blow dry. Richard speeds his stepfamily into the Weatherfield night, aims for the canal. The camera catches up just in time to see the plunge, for 19.4 million pairs of ears to hear him shout I LOVE YOU ALL. This is where the soap opera misses a trick, kills off its greatest creation. The next episode opens with the family Platt dripping wet on the canal bank, hyphen-Hillman sunk alone to its rusted-trolley bottom. Gail identifies her husband’s body, throws her wedding ring to the water. But wait, here’s Richard instead washing up downstream, emerging triumphant for a series of direct-to-video sequels. In the back room of a rental shop, an oversized plastic VHS box screams Killman Part II: The Rover’s Return. Hillman’s back to finish what he started. This time he successfully sends Gail, Sarah-Lou and David to swim with roach and bream, but Little Baby Beth’s channelling Bruce Willis in Unbreakable, fished out in fan-fic to grow into the role of Final Girl. Laurie Strode so Bethany Platt could run. Richard stalks her across reams of cassette tape. Appears in her nightmares. Inexplicably follows her to Manhattan, then outer space. The two are recast, rebooted. But at the end of Part XIII, a headbanded and camo-trousered original Bethany returns them to their beginning, plunges this invincible killer into the poetry of a watery grave. She slumps at the canal side, tired and broken—her long ordeal now surely at an end. Except here’s Richard’s hand bursting out of the basin mid-credits, enjoying again the slasher’s perpetual resurrection. Hear that immutable song echoing down the cutting. See the crowbar’s glint in unholy eyes. We’re two parts of a blood knot, you and me. Always. And forever.
