I, Jack Wright recap
***This post contains many spoilers***
This weekend, I caught the final two episodes of I, Jack Wright on BritBox, and in the process reminded myself why I prefer cozies. This one is decidedly not cozy. Every character has a dark secret or holds a grudge, and the season ends with a lot of uncertainty.
The show kicks off with a family patriarch’s mysterious death and takes the viewer through a complicated web of resentment and deception. The story is told through the use of flashbacks, as Jack’s family recounts what went down in documentary style interviews. His current wife, Sally (glamorously portrayed by Nikki Amuka-Bird) tells her side of the story from what appears to be a prison, so from the beginning we’re meant to suspect she is somehow implicated. We also learn early on that Jack cut Sally and their children, as well his children from his first marriage, out of his will. There is an expansive list of people with a motive to kill Jack, and by episode 5, that it’s even longer.
Jack’s first wife, Rose (Gemma Jones) is terminally ill and lives a quiet life with her sweet but forgettable partner, Bobby (James Fleet). Rose and Jack’s children, John (Daniel Rigby) and Gray (John Simm), embody contrasting legacies. John is the good son who stifled his artistic ambitions to please his father and now simmers with regret after being cut from the will anyways. He is also dealing with a crumbling marriage to Georgia (Zoë Tapper), whose own ambition and extramarital affair, potentially with Jack himself, make her an additional suspect.
Gray is the black sheep of the family who oozes Gen-X disillusionment. He clashes repeatedly with his daughter, Emily (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), who is known for her business success and was tapped by Jack in his will to lead his firm. Emily has her own dark secrets; she is juggling a relationship with a fiancé she’s obviously lukewarm about and a steamy affair with a boyfriend, Reuben (Percelle Ascott), who we are led to believe is also recounting the events from prison. In these final episodes, we also learn Emily had been keeping quiet about her granddad assaulting her when she was a child, but we do not get certainty on her or Reuben’s involvement in Jack’s death.
The detectives in this story seem more like audience surrogates than traditional sleuths. DCI Hector Morgan‘s (Harry Lloyd) and DC Katie Jones‘s (Liz Kingsman) roles are deliberately understated to keep the focus on the Wright family’s chaos. We get a glimpse into Morgan’s emotional baggage, though; he is raising two kids and pining for his absent wife. DC Jones is the epitome of procedural predictability, chasing leads and providing dry updates.
The writers of this show side-stepped the detective-driven mystery structure by framing the story through the true-crime documentary crew. The device allows the show to zigzag between past and present and to splice police interrogation with candid family interviews and flashbacks. Since the DCI and his partner are subjects of the documentary and not its narrators, they are not solving the mystery for us; in fact, we’re watching them play catch up to a story the viewer pieces together ahead of them.
In these final episodes, pretty much the only thing we get clarity on is whether Emily will walk away with as much of Jack Wright’s estate as he indicated in his will. Her father and uncle successfully challenged the will in court and got a ruling in their favor that feels very just. This satisfaction was short-lived for me, though, because by the end, we realize John is being taped from an institution of some sort (a mental hospital? a jail?).
Just a few minutes from the end of the entire season, Emily is charged with soliciting murder. Presumably, she got Reuben to murder Jack. Yet the documentary film crew interviews her from her home in California, so it may be safe to assume the charge was dropped. Sally continues to be interviewed by the crew in the prison-like setting, and says she “did kill a man,” though we are led to speculate that she killed her lover—and not her husband Jack.
Sally is also given a fair amount of screen time near the end for pondering why Jack cut her and her son out of the will. Was it actually an act of love? Freeing them from wealth? Her real belief, it seems, though, is that Jack favored Emily because she was a product of his first marriage, and in his eyes, most like him. As the viewer, though, we have the privileged vantage point of knowing that Jack learned of Sally’s infidelity, which could have led him to exclude her, and we also know Jack may have left it all to Emily as penance for his mistreatment of her.
In the final moments of the series, Rose, Jack’s first wife (also Emily’s grandmother) walks herself into a police station and confesses to Jack’s murder. Presumably this is a loving grandmother taking the blame to keep her granddaughter out of jail (she’s terminally ill, after all), but nothing is confirmed after that moment.
I went into this one blindly, knowing it wasn’t cozy but expecting the various storylines to be resolved in the one season. Instead, it literally ended with the words “to be continued” on the screen. If you can tolerate this level of uncertainty, I recommend the series.