Doctor Foster, series 2 finale review: a bonkers but thoroughly unsatisfying climax

“There’s only one way I’m leaving here and that’s in a coffin,” ghastly Smirking Simon warned his ex-wife in the second series of Dr Foster.

Viewers tuning in to Tuesday night’s grand finale were on the edge of their seats. Would Simon end up 10 feet under? Had Gemma squashed him like a cockroach under the wheels of her car? What had Simon told Tom, which had persuaded his 15-year-old son to move in with dad, new wife and baby? Above all, how on earth were they going to come up with a plausible ending to a series which has gone beyond mere melodrama into a whole new genre of its own. Let’s call it Revenge Tragedy Bonkers (RTB).

We soon discovered the answer: they couldn’t work out how to finish it. Simon (Bertie Carvel) and Gemma (Suranne Jones) were crude caricatures: Punch and Judy on acid, vying to outdo each other in nastiness and failing, quite repellently, to be responsible parents. The whole series could have been subtitled: How To Traumatise Your Teenager in Five Wicked Steps.  

Admittedly, the hell hath no fury plot had its madder moments in Series One, but at least Gemma was operating within an acceptable range of betrayed-wife craziness. You never stopped cheering her on. This time, she appeared to have given up working as a GP to pursue a career as a stalker. No wonder you can’t get an appointment at the doctor!

Realising belatedly that he had turned the nation’s favourite spurned woman into the kind of loony friend whose texts you never return, writer Mike Bartlett spent much of the final episode trying to give Gemma back some humanity. There were soft-focus flashbacks to domestic bliss in the Foster household. There were cringe-making attempts at reconciliation: “You could just decide to forgive everything. It ends with us admitting we got it so wrong and getting back together.”

Noooooo. Stop that at once! Characters in RTB are not allowed to be sensible. Thankfully, the Fosters were soon restored to their usual charming selves: “If I had a knife now, I’d stab you here and here and here,” hissed Simon. “You should stab yourself,” snarled Gemma. Later, when her Ex stood by a roadside choosing a passing truck to throw himself under, she cried out like a mum to an errant toddler, “Simon, come away from the traffic!”

This was definitely a bit of TV history: the first laugh-out-loud screen suicide attempt. Bertie Carvel did his best, exchanging Simon’s demonic perma-smirk for red-eyed despair, but you could feel nothing for a man the script had made into an irredeemable pantomime villain.   

The Foster family adjourned for the opposite of a Happy Meal; a Breakfast of Doom. Gemma proved her wifely credentials by knowing exactly what Simon liked in his Full English, but the caring effect was a teensy bit undermined when she broke off to go and put a suicide kit in his hotel room.

Poor shattered, tug-of-hate Tom revealed his dad had told him his mother left him alone when he was a baby. “I had post-natal depression! Despite everything I’ve been a good mum and you’ll realise that,” said Gemma, newly returned from laying out a lethal injection. “Follow the instructions,” she told Simon chillingly. Ten minutes later she was back to halt the death she had set in motion. Like the drama itself, Gemma couldn’t quite make up her mind whether to be good or evil.

Meanwhile, torn between his alternately vicious and suicidal parents, Tom did the only sensible thing and ran away. Smart boy. A piece by his mother to camera at the very end – “Tom, I love you, I’m sorry, and I’m here” – was meant to tug at the heartstrings, but we had run out of sympathy for Dr Foster.

The only tears I cried were over the fact that we are living in a golden age for American TV drama and this is the pot-boiling tosh the BBC serves up to its British audience.

I suspect that fans who turned on the Doctor Foster finale expecting more jaw-dropping, “You go, girl!” air-punching moments will have been disappointed and not a little baffled.

Perhaps the only satisfying climax to this crazy, Revenge Tragedy Bonkers show would have been Simon and Gemma locked in murderous revenge sex at the bottom of Simon’s former swimming pool, squeezing the life out of each other while drowning simultaneously. It couldn’t happen to two nicer people.

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