Episode 7 

It’s the last episode before the season finale, and things are heating up in sunny seaside Broadchurch. We’re

close to the jury finally deciding whether Joe Miller is guilty of Danny Latimer’s death, and

close to finding out what really happened at Sandbrook several years before.

We start this episode off with Ellie Miller, Alec Hardy, and Alec’s ex-wife Tess going over Sandbrook evidence yet again at Hardy’s house. They now know Claire had the heart pendant that Pippa Gillespie had been wearing when she was killed, since Ellie saw her wearing it in her hairstyling portfolio the episode before.

Except now they realize the pendant could have been Claire’s all along, and that she gave it to Pippa for some reason in advance of her being killed. (So much for my theory that she was a murderous idiot for taking a trophy off a dead kid last week.) Although she could still be a murderer. At this point, Hardy is determined to bring Claire down, and gives Miller the directive to light a fire under her ass.

Speaking of Claire, in the next scene we see her waking up in a tiny shed right on the beach. Question—are you allowed to sleep in these sheds? Or are they storage? It’s pretty sweet prime property, and about the size of my first NYC apartment, so I’d live there if I could. But this is off point. Ellie calls Claire and tells her she knows the pendant was hers, and Claire admits it. Is she getting closer to confessing something?

Hardy then goes to see Lee Ashworth, squatting in his ruins up on the hill as usual (where does he shower? go to the bathroom?) and tells Lee that he’s more determined than ever to bust him. “I’m more than alright. I’m reborn!” he tells Lee about his newfound energy now that his bad heart is all patched up. Lee is clearly bothered by Hardy’s dogged determination to bust Lee for the Sandbrook murders. He gets even more bothered when Hardy tells him that Claire had once been pregnant with Lee’s baby and never told him. “I don’t believe you,” he tells Hardy. Hardy shrugs. “Ask her,” he says before walking away.

We then head back to the courtroom, where mean defense lawyer Sharon puts Ellie on the stand as a “hostile witness” and accuses her of bribing her sister with £1,000 into lying when she said she’d seen Joe Miller the night of Danny’s murder. But Ellie was only helping Lucy pay some gambling debts in return for info about the case. (Bad move, Miller.)  Sharon also once again accuses Ellie of having an affair with Hardy.

(Seriously, is this foreshadowing? Do people actually want this to happen? I don’t. Or maybe I kind of do. No, I don’t. I do! I don’t know.)

Hardy and Miller then track down a young kid called Gary Thorpe, the owner of Thorpe Agriculture, a.k.a. the furnace they found where a body could easily have been disposed of. Thorpe admits that he used to love Lisa—the older missing girl in the Sandbrook case—and would stalk her. But he denies any involvement with her death.

Hardy and Miller ask if he stalked her the night she disappeared—he says he was in the hospital because he’d tried to kill himself. But what’s his significance? Is he a new suspect? Or just a random weirdo who doesn’t really matter? Did he let someone burn bodies in his furnace, or is he the killer? We don’t really stay long enough with him to find out.

NEXT: Just a few more plot twists and an attempted murder

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