Episodic Storytelling and why it’s so great (example: “Harrow”, season one)

If you’re here for my ‘Young Royals’ content, don’t worry; we’ll come back to that show in about a week.

For this week, here’s your little belated Easter egg. (Belated Easter eggs are a thing, right? You can stuff yourself with them for days after the official holiday is already over, I’ve heard. And you can absolutely enjoy the treat below regardless of your religious or cultural affiliation, I promise.)

Please note that the text below contains spoilers for the entire first season of ‘Harrow’. Please watch it first and come back to this piece later; it really doesn’t make any sense to read this unless you’ve watched it already. I promise it’ll be more fun to go on your own Easter egg hunt for subtextual clues first and devour the post below later.

Upon watching the season three finale of ‘Young Royals’, I was suddenly faced with a dilemma: Here I had discussed so many cool screenwriting tools with you – tools that are usually quite helpful in making predictions about a show’s further plot developments – and then, the writers of said show decided to leave pretty much everything their subtext had not just hinted at but effectively screamed about hidden from the view of the general audience. Most of the things we had discussed here never made it into the show’s plain text. The subtext remained subtext.

Consequently, I wondered if you’d start to doubt the existence and usefulness of the screenwriting tools we had discussed. Would you just turn your back on mirror characters and mirror scenes and mirrored plotlines? That would be a shame, I thought. Because knowing about all of these tools is actually quite useful, no matter what show or movie you’re watching. Dismissing them all as unimportant or even nonexistent just because one show decided to keep its subtext hidden would mean dismissing the most essential building blocks of any good screenplay.

Which is why I decided to introduce you to a different show – one which uses the exact same tools (mirror characters, mirror scenes, mirrored plotlines, etc.) but which ultimately does pull that final reveal – one that turns its subtext into actual text.

Don’t get me wrong; I, too, was rather dismayed at the fact that ‘Young Royals’ wrote Simon’s backstory of sexual abuse into the subtext for three seasons and then decided to leave that subtext hidden and undisclosed in the end. But perhaps, I thought, we could just check out a show that does the opposite with the very same storytelling tools. This way, I decided, I could prove to you that what we’d been discussing about Simon on ‘Young Royals’ was actually real, and absolutely anyone who either writes screenplays themselves or knows how to analyze them can see it as plainly as the nose on Lisa Ambjörn’s face.

Anyway…

The show we’re going to discuss today is by no means perfect, and I’m sure there’s a lot that could have been done better in its treatment of the particular dark topic it explores. But perfection wasn’t the reason why I picked it; the reason why I picked it was its masterful use of the exact same tools we had discussed on here when we had talked about ‘Young Royals’. And I chose it because, unlike ‘Young Royals’, it dared to pull that final reveal out of the shadows and turn that dark subtext into a very dark text.

This is, once again, the point where I ask you to watch the first season of ‘Harrow’ first before reading on. I promise that it’ll be more fun for you to try and work out some of the subtext on your own, then come back later and (hopefully) see your ideas confirmed here. (Also, we are going to talk about a difficult subject here again; I will try to handle it with care and make this as non-graphic as possible, but please proceed with caution.)

The main character relationship that’s being explored on ‘Harrow’ is the strong bond between a father and his daughter.

That point in and of itself was enough to convince me to watch this show because it’s something you rarely ever see explored on television.

The far more common relationships that TV shows are centred around are romantic relationships between two lovers (usually in the context of a will-they-won’t-they setup). On the rare occasion that a parental relationship is explored more deeply, we’re usually shown the maternal love a mother feels for her children.

This fraught relationship, however, this torn bond between a deeply flawed, but loving father and his mysteriously hurt and troubled daughter seemed intriguing enough to get me hooked right from the start.

And ‘right from the start’ is the correct term to use here. Because there is actually something very important we see right from the start in this story:

Something is wrong with Fern Harrow. Something is very, very much not okay with Dr. Harrow’s daughter. Something happened to that girl, and the fact that she is not alright is made clear to us not just in the subtext but explicitly in the plain text of the show…right from the start.

Fern used to be a straight-A student, we are told, and then her grades mysteriously started to drop, and she dropped out of school for inexplicable reasons. She subsequently went completely off the rails for reasons that both her parents cannot work out, ran away from home at some point off-screen prior to the start of the show and keeps behaving erratically throughout the whole season. By the time the show actually kicks off, Fern has a serious drug problem: She both takes and deals drugs, and lives neither with Harrow nor with her mother, Harrow’s divorced ex-wife. Instead, the girl effectively lives on the streets, squatting in abandoned houses.

Throughout the season, we can see that both Harrow and his ex-wife find it really difficult to even just get in touch with Fern. On the few occasions that they actually run into her, the girl flees the scene pretty quickly and makes it clear she prefers a low-contact arrangement with her parents. These acts of distancing are also marked by a strangely aggressive attitude neither parent truly understands.

The very first episode sees her overdose and end up in hospital. By the time her father makes it over there, she has, however, already checked herself out again and is nowhere to be found.

Her own boyfriend describes her as a ‘mess’ and tells Harrow how jumpy she is and how she keeps looking over her shoulder at all times.

In short, Fern Harrow is going through something, and her parents don’t know what it is. 

They blame her behaviour on their divorce but keep wondering why Fern is taking this divorce so very hard. Other children get through that. Why is Fern unable to deal with it? Why did she go off the rails like that? They clearly want to help her and are desperate for their girl to be ‘normal’ again, but they also don’t seem to understand what is going on with her.

So, even the surface of the text explicitly tells us about a character who is unwell and struggling. But the reason for why that is the case is kept in the subtext for nine whole episodes until the season finale of season one finally pulls that reveal out of the subtext and shows it to us:

It’s a Simon’s-backstory type of reveal (even though there are, of course, differences, and the genres of these two shows are completely different, too).

But despite the fact that Fern’s backstory of sexual abuse is left in the subtext for almost the entirety of season one, it’s actually possible to guess what happened to her pretty early on in the season…if you know how to read subtext.

The very first episode of ‘Harrow’ gives us a cold open in which a man in a hoodie dumps a dead body in a river in the middle of the night. At this point, we don’t know that the man in the hoodie is none other than Harrow himself (something that will be revealed at the end of the first episode), and we don’t know that the body being dumped is Fern’s abuser whom Harrow has killed (something that will be revealed in the season finale).

And yet we can make a few guesses as to what is going on right from the start: The first actual scene (after this cold open and the opening credits that follow it) shows us the main protagonist Dr. Daniel Harrow at work in his exam room. But instead of doing the autopsy that he is supposed to perform, he is, in fact, watching ‘High Noon’ (let’s put a pin in that film choice for now; we will come back to it later). His boss interrupts him and tells him in no uncertain terms that he has got a job to do, but Harrow just asks a colleague to do it for him.

So, he effectively ‘dumps’ that job, that dead body on the slab, on a colleague – just like he literally dumped that other dead body into the river in the cold open before the opening credits.

That’s because symbolically both dead bodies are the same! The dead body lying in his exam room at this point is a mirror character for the one he disposed of in the river.

And look how this tracks with the season’s final reveal: In those first few moments of the show, Harrow tells his boss that the dead body in his exam room is a child molester (which reflects the fact that that other dead body he dumped in the river is the man who sexually abused his daughter). He then adds that the dead body in his exam room is dressed up as a clown – the symbolism here should give you shivers down your spine: Clowns are actually supposed to bring joy and laughter to children; they exist solely to make kids smile. They are funny and lovely and harmless. But right in these first few moments of the show, Harrow tells us that clowns are actually the stuff of nightmares, too. Beneath their painted faces, they hide true horrors. No wonder so many people are afraid of clowns.

It’s a brilliant mirror image of the man who abused Fern Harrow and who is now lying dead at the bottom of the river where Harrow put him: Seemingly harmless, a (step-)father figure to a minor (Fern). From the outside, he was just this good-natured, somewhat rough, but quirky and sweet family man…but underneath the metaphorical clown getup, he was actually a monster. (Also, I hope you caught the way the child-molester-clown’s crotch looks in that ‘exam room scene’. If you didn’t feel like vomiting before, you definitely will once you see it. But the image certainly gets its point across.)

The first scene of the show, this ‘exam room scene’, is great exposition, brilliantly written and executed, in my opinion; it’s a scene that slyly introduces us to the show’s three main themes. (We will see later on what those three themes are.)

If you knew about the final reveal beforehand (which a lot of you did because I had effectively spoiled it for you in the comments, sorry again), then understanding the importance of these first few moments was probably very easy, and you could see the significance of the child-molester-clown in Harrow’s exam room instantly. If you didn’t know about the final reveal, however, I’m willing to bet that this scene might have been a bit more obscure and on par with that ‘tax evasion vs. welfare fraud’ scene in the first episode of ‘Young Royals’: It tells you what happened, yes; it even spells it out (Harrow explicitly calls the clown a child molester, and the teacher at Hillerska has the two words that describe what happened to Simon written out on the whiteboard at the front of the class), and yet it probably goes over the heads of many viewers who are not used to reading subtext as they watch a show.

So, the first few minutes of this show instantly introduce the dark topic that lurks in the depths of the subtext of ‘Harrow’.

But as we keep on watching, the next question we as viewers should ask ourselves is: If this mirror character, this child-molester-clown, is shown to us in the very first moments of the show…then who is the victim in this story? Who did this awful thing actually happen to?

Well, this is where an interesting and far more subtle detail comes in:

The theme of lost girls permeates the first season. Lost girls, girls who are troubled, girls who are adrift, girls who literally run off the right track in the outback, get lost somewhere and encounter evil by stumbling on a dead body in the tall grass…the theme of lost girls is written all over the subtext. The fact that something is not okay with Fern Harrow is mirrored on so many levels and in so many subtextual ways in this story…

You all know how to read subtext, of course, so you probably spotted all the more narrative-heavy mirror characters, too, as you watched the show.

Let’s take a look at one particularly obvious episode (and it’s one that showcases more than just a few mirror characters; it actually gives us a slew of metaphors we know from ‘Young Royals’ as well, so this is actually great!):

Episode five of season one is entitled ‘Non Sum Qualis Eram’ (‘I’m not what I used to be’) – undoubtedly a reference to Ernest Dowson’s famous poem ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’. And what the symbolist poet gives us in this dark and sensual poem marked by lush fin de siècle musicality is more than just an erotic fantasy of a man who’s lying with a prostitute yet remains obsessed with his old love: Its title is, in turn, a reference to Horace’s ‘Odes’ (Book IV, Poem I), in which the speaker implores Venus (the Goddess of Love) to leave him be, only to discover a new attraction to an unattainable young man.

In this episode title, we are thus given two stories instead of just one:

There’s the story of an obsession in Dowson’s poem, an old love that never leaves the speaker alone, a love like an incurable illness, a love that has befallen a debauched man: possessive, sick and wrong, yet directed at a female beloved who’s likened to a lily, that age-old Christian symbol of virginity and purity, a love that – though wrong and obsessive itself – is directed at a girl who’s pure and innocent.

And then there’s the other story: the one from Horace’s lamentation to the Goddess Venus to leave him be, where the speaker encounters sexual attraction in the form of a beautiful youth, much to his dismay.

Dowson himself (a representative of the 19^th-century Decadent Movement and translator of Verlaine’s poetry into English) would probably shock us today with his biography, at least when viewed through the lens of our modern-day sensibilities: The poet fell in love with an 11-year-old girl and tried to marry her when she was 15 years old.

The title of the episode tells us that all of this should be playing at the back of our mind as we watch this episode that pretends to be nothing more than just a criminal puzzle about drugs because this Dowson reference is the actual dark cloud hanging over this whole episode; this is the subtextual shadow between the lines here. (And we will come back to the Horace angle, i.e. the bisexuality angle of this show, later on, I promise.)

The plot of the episode itself presents Harrow with a particularly difficult puzzle:

A girl named Hannah has been hospitalized after overdosing on some unknown drug. She is literally at death’s door because no doctor can work out what exactly it is that Hannah took. This unknown drug isn’t acting alone, though: It’s interfering with a heart condition the girl is said to be suffering from.

If Harrow can establish what drug it was that Hannah took, he might be able to save her life!

Appearance-wise, Hannah doesn’t really look a lot like Fern Harrow at first glance, but she’s wearing devil horns at the drug party we’re shown – just like Fern. And even if she weren’t, the structure of the struggle here, the drugs, Harrow’s desperation to solve this puzzle, his absolute need to find out what drug Hannah took, the fact that she’s in the hospital with a drug overdose in the first place (like Fern in the very first episode of the show) and, well, the fact that it’s a girl to whom this is all happening…all of these subtle hints point to the fact that Hannah, the girl in the hospital, is Fern’s mirror character.

Something happened to Fern, too. But that something wasn’t a literal drug; it was a metaphorical one.

We have seen the ‘drug’ metaphor on ‘Young Royals’ before, and here, on this show, it almost gets its own speaking part: The drug is a metaphor for the abuse, of course, the sexual abuse that Harrow’s daughter suffered at the hands of someone who (at this point in the story) is still hidden in the shadows of the subtext.

But while ‘Young Royals’ draws a clear distinction between taking and dealing drugs (where dealing means ‘being the victim’ and taking the drugs means ‘being the abuser’), this show delineates the whole concept in a different way. Both victim and abuser are constantly dealing and taking, taking and dealing drugs, which is probably supposed to reflect the circular nature of sexual relations: the abuse exists in this undefined dark space between the abuser and the victim, but when the victim isn’t fully aware that she is, in fact, being abused (because she has strong romantic feelings for the abuser, for example), the sex might feel like a give and take to her – until it’s too late.

It’s just as it is in Dowson’s poem where love is described as a sickness (“[…]I am desolate and sick of an old passion[…]”), an unhealthy obsession that eats you up and destroys you. And yet the speaker in all his debauchery cannot let go of it, this love for a girl who’s symbolically as pure and innocent as a lily.

And that’s why we see Fern both deal drugs and take them. That’s why her mirror character Hannah is in the hospital, fighting for her life because she took something…something nobody knows anything about. The drugs Hannah took are the metaphor here, a metaphor for an obsessive and wrong love, a sick love, and she’s shown to be unconscious in that hospital, i.e. she cannot tell anyone (just like Fern can’t find the right words to talk about the sexual abuse she suffered because it all feels like an old love to her, one that she is inexplicably traumatized by, one that makes her sick, but one that keeps haunting her memories and that she cannot fight off). 

And that’s of course why that drug is said to be interfering with Hannah’s heart condition!

This little detail is so great because it illuminates something very important in a metaphorical way: Just like Simon’s backstory on ‘Young Royals’, Fern’s trauma isn’t one of rape-by-stranger. Fern wasn’t jumped by someone in a dark alleyway. That’s what makes it so difficult for her to talk about it to anyone.

She was groomed by somebody, manipulated into a romantic and sexual relationship by an adult. And this somebody, this adult, was someone she felt attracted to and had romantic feelings for. It was a matter of the heart (!). The case of the girl in the hospital, Hannah’s medical case, shows us that the metaphorical ‘drugs’ (read: the abuse) and this metaphorical ‘heart condition’ are interacting in their destruction of her. (That it was, in fact, Fern’s stepfather who abused Fern and that she herself pursued him, not really understanding that consent wasn’t possible in a relationship like that, that she must have had a crush on him and he abused her instead of firmly telling her no…all of this is then revealed in the final episode of season one.)

Note how throughout his short visit to the hospital in that episode, Harrow is framed with a heart sticker right beside him. This whole story is about the heart: Hannah’s metaphorical ‘heart condition’ that just codes for Fern’s crush on the man who ultimately ended up abusing her.

Hannah, the girl in the hospital, Fern’s mirror character, is said to be dying; she is wasting away; she’s on death’s door. Which just goes to show how devastated Fern actually is at this point. It’s not explicitly told to us, but the subtext of Hannah fighting for her life in a hospital bed points to the fact that Fern Harrow doesn’t care for her life the way a happy young girl her age should. (Fern just overdosing and then checking herself right out of the hospital again in episode one also highlights that she is, if not suicidal, then at least indifferent as to what will happen to her.)

We get another mirror character in that very same episode, by the way: Grace. Another girl who took the same drug (!) Hannah took. And then Grace opened a window and jumped to her death in a drug-induced hallucination episode. 

If you’ve been following our discussion of ‘Young Royals’, dear reader, you have, of course, realized that it’s much more difficult to write about an ongoing TV show and make predictions about its finale based on the subtext analysis of its first two seasons than to write about an already finished series.

In that sense, writing about ‘Harrow’ is, of course, much easier for me. It’s a finished story, and I have watched all three seasons of it.

But to make this here a more fun experience for you, and just to approach this whole analysis honestly, I’ve decided to tell you about all my mistakes when it comes to analyzing this show, too. What do you think? Would you like to hear about all the dead ends I walked down as I watched it? Because I think it’s actually quite interesting to know where somebody else went wrong. So, how about I tell you about all my mistakes, too? Just to show you how inexact a ‘science’ all this subtext stuff actually is.

When I first watched this episode and saw Grace jump off the ledge under the influence of those drugs, I thought that this foreshadowed the fact that Fern would, in fact, try to commit suicide at some point later on.

And just as with Wilhelm on ‘Young Royals’, I was sort of semi-certain that this might happen. (Well, actually, I was a bit more certain about Fern than about Wilhelm. After all, Fern got a bona fide mirror character who actually jumped out of a window. And as I told you before, mirrors are the most accurate tool you ever get in a story’s subtext. So, that seemed certain enough to me. Wilhelm just got Sara making a few snarky comments about the author Karin Boye’s ultimate fate. Fern, on the other hand, got an actual mirror character who jumped to her death right on screen.)

Well, and you will probably all agree that, when it comes to Fern, the self-neglect and that hint of suicidality are definitely there. After all, we can see that clearly in the text itself in her overdose in the very first episode. 

And yet my prediction was still wrong. Fern never attempted to commit suicide.

Do you know why?

That’s where my mistake comes in: I didn’t catch the fact that jumping from/falling off a building isn’t supposed to be taken literally. Falling is actually a metaphor on ‘Harrow’!

So, here is something I actually really, really like: We get a new metaphor that we don’t know from ‘Young Royals’. Something completely new to play with. Yay!

And again, full disclosure: No, I did not catch it as I first watched this episode of ‘Harrow’; I only understood this once I watched season two and three (no spoilers, I promise).

Falling…is a metaphor. A metaphor for falling in love! (And yes, this will prove to be a really, really cool and useful metaphor if you decide to watch on and give the other two seasons of ‘Harrow’ a try. It will be much easier to understand what those two seasons are about, I promise…And you’re welcome.)

Grace, the girl, who jumps out of the window under the influence of those drugs acts as a mirror character for Fern, showing us that Fern fell for her abuser.

The romantic feelings and the metaphorical ‘drug’ (read: the abuse, the ‘wrong kind of love’, the ‘sick’ love) were acting in tandem. Just like Hannah’s heart condition and the ‘drugs’ are interacting in the hospital.

Well, and the fact that falling off a building and subsequently dying, smashed against the pavement, isn’t exactly a good thing in real life should already clue you in on the fact that falling in love is described as something tragic, painful and potentially fatal in this way.

In Grace’s case, these ‘drugs’ and the metaphorical ‘fall’ doomed her. It was fatal.

Hannah’s case in the hospital shows us an alternative: one in which Harrow can still figure out what happened to the girl and thus save her; if he hurries and works it out quickly enough, she can survive and live a normal life again.

And that’s why Harrow is shown to be so desperate to find out what exactly happened to Hannah, the girl in the hospital. What drug did she take? What is threatening her life now? Subtextually, we are told here how desperate Harrow was to find out what exactly had happened to his daughter Fern (back then, before he found out all about it and killed her abuser). Harrow literally cuts Grace open right on the pavement to get to the bottom of this question, but it doesn’t work.

So, Harrow is basically taking one mirror character apart to find out what happened to the other mirror character. Harrow is examining the bad outcome, the one where his daughter is doomed; he is looking at that awful alternate reality…in order to find out how to save his daughter in the other reality, the actual one, the one where she can still be saved. The two mirror characters, Grace and Hannah, show us two different possible outcomes, and Harrow surgically explores one to save the other. 

That doesn’t work, though…(Hold that thought!)

Episode five gives us more than just those two mirror characters for Fern. And more than just those metaphors, too (more than just the ‘drug’ metaphor, the ‘heart condition’ metaphor and the ‘fall’ metaphor):

We are given an actual murder victim, too (as befits a crime mystery series).

And that murder victim is…tada! Another young woman, i.e. another mirror character for Fern. Her name is Xantia.

Xantia actually even looks like Fern from behind. She is wearing a similar dress and has her blond hair styled in an updo reminiscent of Fern’s. And since she is present at the same (!) drug party Fern is at, it’s actually difficult to keep her and Fern apart for a few moments at the very beginning of the episode. The confusion is by design, of course: Xantia, the murder victim, mirrors Fern, too, we are told in this way.

These three mirror characters (Hannah in the hospital, Xantia, the murder victim, and Grace, the girl who jumped to her death), are all Fern. And the way the first few minutes of the episode are filmed, the way we cut back and forth between these four girls, makes this very, very clear. (There’s a moment Xantia takes money out of her purse, and we cut straight to a closeup of Fern doing the same thing, for example. There’s a moment in which Grace kicks back some champagne, and we cut straight to Xantia doing the same, etc.) These first few minutes are almost confusing in the way they cut back and forth between Fern and her three mirrors. And all of that is by design: This is the way the show chose to visualize the manner in which the mirroring works in this episode.

By the way, you did work out that their names clearly tell us that they’re all mirrors for Fern, right? There’s Xantia (which translates as: ‘the blond one’, well, duh!). There’s Hannah (which translates as: ‘a gift/grace granted by God’, and that’s clearly what Harrow feels his child is). And there’s even a girl literally called Grace. (Please keep in mind that the names of the mirror characters tell us something about the character being mirrored, not about the side characters themselves. Because they’re not really important; Fern is!)

Xantia is then revealed to have been killed by a man (no surprise there; the guy mirrors Fern’s abuser, after all). And we also find out that she dealt drugs, too (just like Fern).

The murderer is Billie, Fern’s drug dealer, who, in turn, got his drugs from Xantia…

I mentioned above that the circular way in which the metaphorical ‘drugs’ exchange hands here is important; the snake is really biting its own tail on that one, isn’t it?

When Fern performs CPR on Billie, Xantia’s murderer, the imagery is extremely suggestive, too: Fern is giving him mouth-to-mouth, and together with the knowledge that Billie mirrors her abuser, this image that’s visually so reminiscent of a kiss, tells us all we need to know.

Billie escapes justice in the end (he literally runs away from the police and out of the hospital)...or does he? Because he actually ends up dead, anyway. All of which mirrors what happened to Fern’s abuser, of course. He escaped justice (the official, lawful kind), but also…he really, really didn’t!

Billie is hit by a lorry…and Fern’s abuser? Well, Fern’s abuser is hit by none other than Harrow himself! Harrow hit Robert Quinn like a truck, we are told in this very, very visual way. Because that’s what fathers do when someone harms their child: They take justice into their own hands.

But back to our metaphors…

Here comes the point that should really interest us, ‘Young Royals’-hardened subtext veterans: During his investigation, Harrow finds out that Xantia owned a locker (!). A lot of emphasis is placed on this fact, and said locker isn’t even located at a school or railway station; Harrow finds it in a dark underpass, under some bridge in a park.

The whole puzzle can be solved once Harrow finds and opens that locker because (you’ve guessed it) the locker is a metaphor for Xantia’s secret – or rather Fern’s secret.

And what’s inside that locker?

Surprise, surprise…the metaphorical ‘drugs’ and the metaphorical ‘money’. So, the metaphorical ‘locker’ (read: the secret) of Xantia (read: Fern) contains the metaphorical ‘drugs’ (read: the abuse).

You all got that, right?

And the minute Harrow finds and opens that locker, he can finally solve that whole crime and find out what happened to Xantia, the murder victim (subtextually: his own daughter), that’s when he finds out who the perpetrator was: Billie.

As far as Hannah in the hospital is concerned…well, it’s actually Fern herself who eventually gives the drugs to her father, so he can have them analyzed and find out what drugs Hannah took. And once Harrow does just that, Hannah’s life is saved.

And because I told you I would reveal all my mistakes, so you can get a good laugh out of poor tvmicroscope fumbling in the dark and stumbling down the wrong paths on this subtext analysis trip, I will now tell you what I got wrong here:

Just from watching this episode, I actually came away with the wrong impression that Fern would eventually tell Harrow what had happened to her, that she would tell him about the abuse herself. After all, she had given her father the drugs, right? It seemed to make sense to me at the time.

But I didn’t account for the fact that Fern just gave Harrow the drugs so he could have them analyzed. It’s not that she analyzed the drugs herself! In other words, the reveal in the season finale where Harrow watches Fern and her abuser interact out in the street, analyzes their interaction and understands what had happened to Fern from that, all of that was actually clearly foreshadowed right there at that moment when Fern gave Harrow the drugs to analyze. I just misinterpreted her giving him the drugs.

Anyway, the subtext of this episode couldn’t be any clearer, and episode five is definitely the point at which you, as a viewer, should have worked out what the final reveal of the last episode was going to be: that Fern Harrow was sexually abused.

I’m sure you all got that, what with some of the metaphors (the ‘drugs’, the ‘locker’, etc.) being so similar to the ones used on ‘Young Royals’. 

And no worries, we’re not going to analyze each and every single episode of the first season of ‘Harrow’ like we did this one. There are ten episodes in total. We would never get anything else done if we put all of them under the microscope like that. So, this was really just an example. (And we didn’t even talk about everything that this brilliant episode has to offer subtextually.)

Instead, here’s what we’re going to do: We will talk about structure for a bit, if that’s okay with you:

One of the things that probably surprised you as you watched the show is the fact that the subtext seems to strangely jump back and forth between rather different themes.

The whole story is built on a ‘case-of-the-week’ structure, wherein Harrow solves one puzzle, i.e. gets to the bottom of one crime per episode. So, why does the subtext of those criminal cases seem to jump all over the place?

To understand what we’re looking at structurally here, we have to understand what type of story we’re actually dealing with in ‘Harrow’.

You see, TV shows come in roughly two formats:

• serialized shows and

• episodic shows

‘Young Royals’ is an example of a serial – a show with a serialized format. This means that it has one cohesive story that has to be watched strictly in order. You cannot just start watching it somewhere around episode three of season two and expect to understand what’s going on. You also can’t skip any episodes. It has one story that unfolds step by step throughout the episodes and seasons; one episode builds on the next. Watching all of them in the right order, without skipping a single one, is important for understanding the plot. Other examples of serials are ‘Breaking Bad’, ‘The Sopranos’ or ‘Mad Men’.

Episodic shows work in a different way: Sitcoms are usually episodic shows, for example. You can start watching ‘Seinfeld’ at any point in any season and still get a lot of enjoyment out of the show, without having to watch all the episodes in the right order. You can skip as many as you like because each episode tells a self-contained story (to some degree). That means that each episode wraps up whatever story it set out to tell the audience before the episode is over; the story usually runs its course within that one episode.

Now, one subset of this episodic format is a procedural show (although colloquially the two terms are often used interchangeably).

A procedural is a show that, well…follows procedure, so to speak. These can be police procedurals (like ‘The Mentalist’), medical procedurals (like ‘House M.D.’ or ‘The Good Doctor’), legal procedurals (like ‘The Good Wife’), etc. 

Not every show that follows an episodic format is a procedural. There are, in fact, shows in which each story runs its course within just one episode but that aren’t considered procedurals because they don’t focus on procedure (‘Star Trek’ would be one such example; well, and the sitcoms mentioned above, of course). 

And technically, there are even procedurals that don’t fall into the category of an episodic show but are serials, instead (‘The Wire’ comes to mind here).

But usually, procedurals follow an episodic format – or rather: a semi-episodic one.

Because, you see, most procedural shows these days do contain significant serialized elements: With these types of procedurals, you get a largely episodic format, where each episode tells a self-contained story, but each episode also contains strands of a longer overarching storyline that can span the whole season (or perhaps even several seasons). You get your ‘case-of-the-week’ type of episodes (on ‘House M.D.’ that would be each ‘patient of the week’s’ self-contained story, for example: their respective illness and the resolution with their eventual diagnosis, etc.), but you also get longer story arcs that are tailored to the main characters.

A lot of procedural shows are actually structured in this way, and ‘Harrow’ is obviously no exception.

Now, the usual way in which the subtext is conveyed in a procedural with a format like that is the following one:

Each episode gives you a ‘case of the week’ (this can be one medical case per episode in a medical drama, a client per episode in a legal drama, a crime per episode in a mystery series, a monster per episode in a horror show, etc.). All the side characters of said case are obviously mirror characters, the ‘case of the week’ itself is a mirror case for the larger plotline of the season, each and every puzzle that needs to be solved in each of these episodes mirrors the larger puzzle that the main protagonist has to solve, that one big struggle™ he or she is going through over the course of the season (or even several seasons).

Semi-serialized/semi-episodic procedurals are great this way: You can work out the mirroring just by starting from the assumption that each and every ‘case of the week’ mirrors the larger plotline somehow.

(That’s not to say that serials like ‘Young Royals’ don’t employ mirroring at all. It’s just not as easy to spot with a show that strictly follows along one storytelling axis and doesn’t have ‘cases of the week’ like that. Which is probably why ‘Young Royals’ went out of its way to make sure its mirror characters were easy to recognize: Just think of the way in which Stella was often dressed in purple from head to toe. And let’s not even go into all the literal, actual glass mirrors that the set designers littered its various sets with. The creators of ‘Young Royals’ knew that mirroring is more difficult to work out in a serialized format that lacks that telltale episodic ‘case-of-the-week’ structure, so they made sure it was really, really noticeable.)

Anyway, so what the image above lays out is how episodic TV shows normally integrate a serialized element (i.e. the overarching plotline of the season) into its core structure to create a typical procedural show: Every ‘case of the week’ mirrors the larger puzzle that spans the whole season or even several seasons.

But the structure of ‘Harrow’, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed, is a bit more complex than that.

At first glance, it just seems to jump from cases that do, indeed, mirror Fern’s abuse story to cases that seem to subtextually tell us completely different stories.

So, what do these other cases tell us? And how are they connected to Fern’s backstory of abuse? What is the basic structure of ‘Harrow’?

Well, it looks more something like this:

The overarching plotline of the season is Fern’s abuse storyline, of course. And yes, some of the cases that Harrow solves (such as the drug case from episode five) are clear mirror cases for Fern’s story, as we have discussed above.

But there are other episodes with other cases, too, and these don’t really map onto Fern’s story; they are mirror cases for Harrow’s own backstory. In that sense, the narrative jumps back and forth between very different episodes: Some mirror Fern’s story of abuse, some mirror Harrow’s backstory, and some episodes mirror both these plotlines together.

And this is where it gets really interesting because Harrow’s backstory is actually connected to Fern’s story of abuse.

So, what is Harrow’s backstory?

Well, if you’ve watched season one, I’m sure you’ve spotted it by now: Dr. Daniel Harrow is bisexual.

But sadly he’s not the happy-go-lucky kind that we would wish anyone in the world to be, no matter what their sexual orientation is. In other words, Harrow isn’t freely expressing his orientation; he’s unfortunately repressed beyond comprehension: Harrow is closeted about one ‘side’ of his sexuality – the one that experiences attraction to men.

Harrow lives the life of a straight man, but he has that other ‘side’ to his sexuality that never fully goes away, a ‘side’ which he doesn’t allow to break free either. It’s a very painful and awful way to live.

And all of that is reflected in the structure of season one.

I had mentioned above that this first season of the show focuses on three core themes. And the separate episodes with those ‘cases of the week’ that Harrow solves throughout the season do metaphorically encompass all three of them:

1. Fern’s abuse storyline

2. Harrow’s bisexuality

3. And the following moral conundrum: Is murder ever justifiable?

We’ve talked about 1) Fern’s abuse storyline above, and I gave you one example episode (the drug case in episode five).

Maybe we should quickly talk about theme 3) first before we delve further into 2), i.e. the complicated topic of Harrow’s issues with his own sexuality?

Theme 3) is clearly mirrored in Harrow’s ‘cases of the week’, and no surprise! Why wouldn’t it be? The question of “Can murder be committed if it is for the ‘right’ reasons?” is not just a fascinating ethical conundrum; it’s one that directly reflects what Harrow has done prior to the start of the first season: He killed the abuser of his daughter Fern.

That this theme of the ‘justifiable murder’ is an important one is evident from episode nine, for example, an episode that’s fittingly entitled ‘Lex Talionis’ (‘The Law of Retaliation’): Lex talionis or ius talionis is, of course, a legal principle commonly known as the principle of ‘an eye for an eye’. Its earliest known use appears in the Mesopotamian ‘Code of Hammurabi’, but when quoted in pop-cultural contexts such as this, it’s usually understood that the reference is to the Hebrew Bible.

Consequently, the episode itself deals with the theme of retaliation. A holocaust survivor recognizes an SS-officer in their shared nursing home. She kills him. But the story makes it very clear where our sympathies should lie here: She has lost her little sister (a mirror character for Fern, of course) when the SS-officer in question ordered her into the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

The elderly holocaust survivor Judy is obviously a mirror character for Harrow. The SS-officer mirrors Fern’s abuser. And here we get one of those interesting narrative cases that we don’t see on ‘Young Royals’ all that often: A mirror that enlarges instead of shrinking the actual case it’s mirroring down in size.

You might remember that ‘Young Royals’ largely operates the other way around: When it mirrors something, it automatically shrinks and tones down the actual incident to a much smaller, more harmless mirror image.

Well, episode nine of ‘Harrow’ enlarges the case, instead: Fern’s personal trauma, her backstory of abuse, becomes a whole genocide. In the narrative mirror, it turns into a veritable holocaust. The underlying subtextual message here is, of course, that that is exactly what it feels like for a parent to find out their child has been sexually abused: It’s like a holocaust of the soul – absolute and utter devastation.

And just like the holocaust survivor Judy who smothers the SS-guard in his sleep, the murder of Fern’s abuser by Harrow becomes much more understandable through the illumination of the reasons behind it: Harrow did it because what he went through emotionally after finding out what that monster had done to his child was unimaginable. He committed a horrible crime (murder), but through this mirror case, we are told that sometimes horrible actions can be justified.

That’s a classic case of an enlarged mirror image in the subtext of a story.

Note that the SS-guard calls himself Wagner. And while that is, indeed, a very fitting name for an old Nazi (what with Hitler’s obsession for the German composer’s music), it’s subtextually interesting, as well.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the ‘music’ metaphor on this show as well, haven’t you?

Here we are told that Wagner was never the real name of the SS-guard, that he just called himself that later on in Australia.

Well, and since that SS-officer clearly mirrors the abuser, this tells us something about Fern’s stepdad: That ‘musical’ name was never real. His show of being the perfect stepfather who loved his wife and her child from another marriage, all of that was just pretence. It was never real ‘music’, i.e. never real love.

The male nurse in that episode, who abuses the holocaust survivor and who is portrayed as this slightly cartoonish example of a Neo-Nazi, is, of course, another mirror character for Fern’s abuser. (That the nurse mirrors the SS-officer becomes clear the minute Harrow zooms in on the nurse’s tattoos in his photograph while having a conversation about Wagner’s old blood-type SS-tattoo.) And lo and behold, the nurse is then busted by the police for drug possession. Drugs as a metaphor for the abuse again, right there.

Note that it’s Harrow who calls the police, and yet here we get an alternate reality once again: Harrow lets the police deal with this mirror character and his metaphorical ‘drugs’. But Judy, the elderly holocaust survivor and Harrow’s mirror character, never calls the police; she never even contacts the authorities to get the SS-officer Wagner arrested. She clearly doesn’t trust them to make sure that justice would be served. So, she takes justice into her own hands: She kills Wagner herself, just like Harrow killed Fern’s abuser prior to the start of the season. (Keep that distrust of the authorities and the whole self-administered-justice angle in mind for now; we will come back to it in a minute.)

And I hope you all noticed how Judy tells Harrow about what she’s done afterwards: This is specifically framed as premeditated murder. It’s not something she did in a fit of rage. We are told how she just moved into the nursing home and watched…and waited. And as Judy tells that story to Harrow, the camera keeps cutting back and forth between her and Harrow, who she is so clearly mirroring here.

And that’s reflected in the final reveal, of course: Harrow didn’t just fly off the handle, even if blind rage was certainly a part of it. We are shown how he carefully picked a payphone to call Fern’s abuser Robert Quinn and how he planned to go about the whole murder. What Harrow did wasn’t just manslaughter, the show tells us. This was murder. It was committed with some level of premeditation. And just like Judy, Harrow never called the authorities. He didn’t trust or expect them to make sure justice would be served.

So, is murder ever justifiable?

The case of Judy and the SS-guard gives us the writers’ answer to this question. You can agree or disagree with them, but their verdict on this one seems pretty clear.

“Imagine how I felt when I saw his face,” Judy tells Harrow, probably echoing his own feelings when he saw Robert Quinn’s face after he’d already worked out what that monster had done to his daughter.

And just like Judy, who destroys Wagner’s award certificate, Harrow cuts off Robert’s finger with the wedding band…

And it’s no coincidence, of course, that episode nine, the case of Judy and Wagner, is the last one before the season finale and its reveal. The show is structured cleverly in that way. Everything is geared towards that ending.

(You can, of course, find that dilemmatic question (‘Is murder ever justifiable?’) in other places of the show’s subtext, too, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed. But as I said, we’re not going to examine each and every episode of this season.)

What I’d like to do now is: I’d like to return to that very first episode for a moment – to Harrow’s character establishing moment (and I did, of course, tell you before how important those are): Harrow is watching ‘High Noon’ in his exam room. He is watching it literally over the body of the dead child-molester-clown who, as we have seen, is the very first mirror character for Fern’s abuser on this show.

‘High Noon’ isn’t just a really great film classic; it is a very specific type of Western in that well-worn genre: It’s known as the first Western to turn the tables on the old concept of ‘civilized vs. uncivilized world’. Where older films in the genre had shown life in the Wild West to be a constant struggle between a good civilized society and the barbaric, uncivilized, chaotic evil outside of it, ‘High Noon’ portrays society and civilization itself as corrupt and cowardly.

None of the citizens rush to the main protagonist’s help to defeat evil when it comes a-knocking. Marshal Will Kane is literally left to his own devices, betrayed by civilization at large.

It’s no coincidence that Harrow is first shown to be watching this very Western in his exam room during his character establishing scene: This is the core problem of season one. He has killed someone! He has done something that civilized society deems to be abhorrent and evil, a moral wrong.

But then, the rules of civilized society have betrayed Harrow first (just like the citizens in ‘High Noon’ cowardly leave Marshal Will Kane to his own devices). It was the rules of civilized society that allowed a man like Fern’s abuser to marry Harrow’s ex-wife. Civilized society turned a blind eye to what was going on behind closed doors in that ostensibly nice house. Civilized society wanted this to be a beautiful case of a happy heterosexual nuclear family with a lovely stepdad and a mother and her child. Civilized society had turned a blind eye to the SS-officer living in its midst too, remember? And just like Judy, the holocaust survivor, Harrow was thus left to take justice into his own hands. He had to slay that monster all on his own and outside of the established rules of civilized society.

Intertextuality on screen doesn’t always work, but here it works brilliantly: We get a reference to another movie, ‘High Noon’. We get Harrow’s body superimposed onto the screen and thus said movie within the very first seconds of his character establishing moment. And all of it is literally happening over the dead body of a child molester in clown make-up. The first episode (which is a really well-written pilot episode, by the way, that introduces all the major themes of the show and then some) spins all of these threads together within the first few minutes of the show.

Well, and then, there’s Gary Cooper!

Gary Cooper stars as Marshal Will Kane in ‘High Noon’, of course. And as I’m sure you’re all aware, Gary Cooper was famously bisexual. 

I say ‘famously’, but that’s actually the wrong word to use in this context, since it was all very hush-hush back in the day. Obviously. ‘Famously’ refers to our time and the things Gary Cooper fans know about him nowadays.

Gary Cooper, the acting legend infamously called ‘the strong, silent type’ by Tony Soprano in ‘The Sopranos’ (and there’s a very, very good subtextual reason why the mafia don keeps referencing Gary Cooper throughout that show, believe me), Gary Cooper gained himself a reputation as a notorious skirt chaser by day (whose female conquests numbered in the dozens) and a lover of men by night, which, of course, remained a secret throughout his life.

We thus get a brilliant parallel to Harrow himself: Harrow is obviously interested in women. We can see that. We can observe his female conquests throughout the three seasons with our own eyes.

That other part of him, though, the one where he both physically desires and is romantically attracted to men, remains hidden in the subtext throughout the entire run of the show.

But that he is, indeed, bisexual is obvious to anyone who can read subtext: The show absolutely hammers that fact home.

And you get to see that right in that character establishing moment in episode one of season one:

After the opening credits, we first get an over-the-shoulder shot of Harrow sitting in front of a makeshift screen in his exam room, watching ‘High Noon’. Gary Cooper takes up the left half of the frame, and the back of Harrow’s head takes up the right. They are the same, this visually tells us.

Both in the sense that the main protagonist of ‘High Noon’ faces a similar dilemma to Harrow’s and in the sense that the actor playing him has the same sexual orientation as Harrow.

Then we get a brief glimpse of Marshal Will Kane’s adversaries marching in lockstep across the screen (all representations of evil, of Fern’s abuser, of course). 

And then there’s the reverse shot of Harrow’s face as he watches Gary Cooper. There’s a subtle camera flare covering Harrow’s face at that moment: It’s the very first time we get to see Harrow’s face on this show, and already he is basked in the colours of the rainbow.

This man is bisexual, the camera flare tells us here.

And then we get that whole dialogue with his boss about the child-molester-clown we have discussed above.

The scene ends with Harrow angrily announcing that, “You really shouldn’t interrupt a guy watching ‘High Noon’!”

And boy, is he right about that one, dear reader.

No, but really…Never interrupt a guy who’s watching ‘High Noon’! Never ever.

And no, some dumb autopsy is no reason that would warrant an interruption like that.

Here are some of the other reasons that aren’t good enough excuses for interrupting a ‘High Noon’ watching session, just so you know:

“Darling, dinner is ready!”

“Darling, one of your students is on the phone!”

“Darling, just take the trash out. How many more times do I have to tell you?!”

“Darling, I want sex.”

“Darling, World War III has just started.”

All of those do not warrant an interruption of ‘High Noon’, okay? That’s not me saying that. That’s a scientific fact.

Here’s the only acceptable excuse for ever interrupting ‘High Noon’:

“Darling, the piano’s on fire!”

Just so you know.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes…Harrow’s bisexuality.

Well, that bisexuality isn’t incidental, you see; it is both connected to the rest of the subtext (Fern’s backstory of abuse and the question of the ‘justifiable murder’) and an absolutely indispensable fact for understanding the core struggle Harrow is going through.

I mean, the fact that Harrow is bisexual should have become clear to anyone in episode eight, ‘Peccata Patris’ (‘Sins of the Father’), at the very latest, right?

We’ve got a bunch of students who are rowing here. Oh, look, there’s our ‘water’ metaphor. (It’s hard to miss, to be honest, what with the main protagonist of this show literally living on a boat in the middle of a river and his daughter constantly being called by her nickname ‘Fish’ by the boyfriend who so clearly loves her.)

So, I’m sure you’ve all realized that the ‘water’ metaphor on this show is a thing. And it’s used in a far cleverer way than on ‘Young Royals’, too, I must say. (If you want, I can write about it sometime separately because this post is already getting away from me, as it is.)

In short, you get the whole love and feelings aspect here in this episode about the rowing boys, too.

A special emphasis is placed on the fact that Harrow went to the same school as the boys. And just to round out this whole picture, the victim is actually named Rhys (that most Welsh name of all Welsh names).

Well, and not only does Harrow literally tell us at one point in season one that he’s from Wales, Ioan Gruffudd, the actor playing him, is famously, too. If I were to guess, I’d say that Rhys, the victim, mirrors the boy Harrow fell for back in the day and that Sean, the boy with the awful father, mirrors Harrow himself. But the Welsh name Rhys in and of itself tells you that we’re probably looking at a case of double mirroring here, too.

From there, you can reconstruct pretty much everything, of course: From the fact that Harrow experienced his first time with a boy…to the mortifying, nay, horrifying realization that Harrow’s father walked in on them as they were having sex.

Note the fact that Rhys is said to be allergic to Sean’s semen. So, here’s the way I would suggest to read this: This might very well be a metaphor, too. An allergy, or so it seems to me, is something you cannot control. It isn’t something you choose to have. It’s something that appears out of nowhere and just manifests itself whether you want it to or not. It’s just there. And there’s no way you can just make it go away. If I were to guess, I’d say that this is a metaphor for a phobia. A very particular phobia, as a matter of fact: homophobia – the internalized kind.

Harrow was in love with some boy. He experienced his first time with him. The internalized homophobia might very well be the point where the double mirroring kicks in: This isn’t just Harrow’s first boyfriend struggling with feelings of self-hatred and destructive self-loathing; this might very well be Harrow himself, too. 

In any case, ultimately (with some ‘help’ from Harrow’s father who covered it all up), they all pretended that instead of the metaphorical ‘fall’ on the metaphorical ‘water fountain’, this was just a case of a metaphorical ‘rowing’ accident.

And boy, do we get a clear picture of Harrow’s awful father in this episode. If you don’t feel for Harrow after this story with the boys, you have no heart. It does, in any case, explain why he is so deeply repressed about that ‘side’ of his bisexuality.

There’s a lot more to this episode, as I’m sure you’ve worked out by now, and darkness doesn’t even begin to cover what’s lurking there.

But I’m just retelling this whole tale, so we can all establish that Harrow is, indeed, bisexual. Harrow’s bisexuality is his backstory. 

We can do a bit of a deep dive into that subject at a later point if you still want to. Because that bisexuality is, of course, already obvious far, far earlier in the subtext of season one. For now, let’s keep our eyes on the prize:

How is Harrow’s backstory of bisexuality connected to Fern’s abuse?

Why does the subtext of this show keep jumping back and forth between different subtextual themes? 

Because that’s what it does, right? One episode’s subtext mirrors Fern’s abuse storyline. Another episode’s subtext tells us about Harrow’s sexuality. Yet another episode mirrors both these things at the same time. So, why? Why write a show around both Harrow’s repressed sexuality and an abuse storyline? What is the connection here?

Well, you see, Harrow blames himself for what happened to Fern. If only he hadn’t got divorced, none of that would have happened. If only his marriage with Steph hadn’t fallen apart, Steph wouldn’t have remarried and Harrow would have been closer to his daughter, anyway; he would have stopped anyone from harming her.

His divorce, or so he seems to think, is the factor that caused everything else to happen.

Well, and what caused his divorce?

This is where our hidden bisexuality subtext comes into play. (And to be honest, that subtext is pretty much everywhere. Harrow’s bisexuality is written all over the subtext of this show in episode after episode – and so is the fact that he’s hiding it, that he’s repressing it…)

His heterosexual marriage fell apart because that’s what tends to happen if you actually want something else and that something is a ‘side’ of yourself that you repress – especially if you went into that marriage trying to become somebody you just factually weren’t and aren’t. (Do we need to take the subtext of episode three apart for this? The case with the crocodile in North Queensland, that ate the murder victim? Because that case tells you everything about the connection between Harrow’s bisexuality and his failed marriage. Let me know if we should take a look at it, or if you’ve worked the crocodile case out in its entirety.)

So, to Harrow (as absurd as we might think this sounds), it must seem as if his bisexuality were the main reason why Fern ever met her abuser and was harmed by him.

It’s because of his repressed sexual orientation that his marriage fell apart, and it’s because of that that he was suddenly separated from his child, so he couldn’t protect her anymore when it counted the most. No wonder Harrow perceives his sexuality as something monstrous and horrible. (You do, of course, remember the case with the Chinese multimillionaire in episode six and how he had sex with both a man and a woman, don’t you? And you do realize that this multimillionaire was portrayed as an absolutely ruthless monster. So, that’s what Harrow thinks of himself or rather of his own sexuality. Pretty dark, right?)

The case of the chimaera Sally in episode four is probably one of the most obvious ones, and I’m sure you’ve all worked that out by now. It’s also by far the saddest story of this entire season, I think:

There’s a homeless woman (Sally) and her son Noah in this story. 

Swapping the gender is always a very clever way to hide the subtext, of course. The episode we’re seeing is about a mother and her son, but what we’re actually looking at in the subtext is the story of a father and his daughter: of Harrow and Fern.

Note that Sally is homeless in this episode, which is a metaphorical way of showing us how unmoored Harrow actually is from the world around him.

And in the end, it turns out that Sally couldn’t get custody of her son Noah for one very specific reason: Sally always carried the DNA of two people inside her own body. Medically speaking, she was a chimaera, i.e. metaphorically, she was two things at the same time.

And I’m sure that if I hadn’t seen that exact same metaphor on ‘House M.D.’ years ago, I might not have caught it: Sally is two things at the same time because Harrow is two things at the same time, as well.

Obviously, being a chimaera is not the same thing as being bisexual, but it’s a metaphor: One codes for the other here.

And it’s the fact that Sally has two sets of DNA that ultimately makes it impossible for her to be near her son; it’s what breaks the connection between her and her child.

Just like Harrow’s bisexuality was the thing that broke the connection between Harrow and Fern when he divorced his wife because of his repressed sexual orientation. Harrow’s ‘two-sided’ sexuality, so to speak, was what ultimately undermined the marriage, and because of that divorce, he wasn’t near his daughter when she needed him the most. 

And that’s what he’s blaming himself for.

That’s why the subtext jumps from episode to episode; that’s why it sometimes mirrors Harrow’s bisexuality and sometimes Fern’s abuse storyline. Because that is the connection between these two things.

The ‘Non Sum Qualis Eram’ quote gave us a clever double reference to two different poems that were connected: Dowson’s poem described the obsessive love of a debauched speaker, the sick love he feels he cannot cure himself of, a wrong love for a pure, innocent, virginal girl. And yet the title of the poem refers back to Horace’s ode, too, a lamentation imploring the Goddess Venus to leave the speaker alone, a lamentation that ends in a spark igniting and same-sex love for an unattainable young man being born.

The two themes are connected in those two pieces of world literature: the debauchery of the decadent and dark fin de siècle poem with its theme of sick love for an innocent virgin shows us one theme. And the much, much older Horace ode shows us the other theme; it refers back to Harrow’s past: an ode to bisexual love as a woe and a curse, not as a blessing.

These two themes go hand in hand in that clever poetic reference, and they go hand in hand in the screenplay of this show, as well.

Now, here’s the thing I did not catch immediately at the time (not while I was watching episode one and two and three in any case).  Honestly, full disclosure again: Here’s the thing I really only understood once I watched the very last episode of the season:

Harrow and Fern’s abuser mirror each other!

I know this must have seemed like child’s play to you guys. After all, we had just recently talked about Wilhelm and August mirroring each other on ‘Young Royals’ because the protagonist and the antagonist in a story very often do that.

But if that’s not something that has been recently pointed out to you, it’s not actually something you tend to see, I swear.

And yet it’s clearly there from the very first episode:

Remember episode one of ‘Harrow’?

The father of Olivia Reimers insists that his daughter didn’t kill herself. (And yes, of course, that daughter is a mirror character for Fern, and her father, Mr. Reimers, mirrors Harrow. Obviously.)

But there’s this weird moment in the episode in which Harrow very angrily accuses Mr. Reimers of sexually abusing his daughter Olivia.

Did Harrow just accuse himself of sexually abusing Fern? What?!

No, of course, not. But this is our first clue that Harrow and Fern’s abuser mirror each other, as a protagonist and an antagonist are supposed to.

You see, in that episode, it turns out that Mr. Reimers never touched his daughter Olivia, but he does eventually admit that her depression, all of her problems, really, were actually all his fault: He was working too much. He never took care of her. He neglected her. He distanced himself from her. And that’s why everything that happened to her did, in fact, happen to her.

This shows you what’s going on with Harrow, too: 

Sexual abuse and neglect aren’t the same thing. Not in a million years. And yet, in his mind, Harrow is drawing that parallel. The parallel between the monster who did that horrible thing to Fern and himself who neglected her, who worked too much, who distanced himself from her because he blew up his marriage (because of his repressed bisexuality). In Harrow’s mind, Harrow is just as much of a monster as Robert Quinn is, this mirroring tells us. Because without his neglect of Fern, none of the other horrible things would have ever happened to her.

This case of Olivia Reimers and her father is the very first case we see Harrow solve on the show, and it tells us about Harrow’s feelings of guilt and inadequacy as a father.

But even more so does the ring. That blasted wedding ring!

And this wasn’t something I saw when I first watched that flashback of Harrow cutting Robert Quinn’s ring finger off.

I only understood it in the finale, at the moment when Harrow said the following words, “I don’t know what made me cut off his wedding ring. I just figured he didn’t deserve it.”

The protagonist and the antagonist mirror each other.

Robert Quinn, the horrible monster who was married to Steph (just like Harrow!) is Harrow’s horrible mirror image.

Harrow feels that he is an awful monster, too. That he never deserved to be married to Steph and have this happy, normal, heterosexual life with a kid and a home and a lovely wife. Harrow feels that he is monstrous because of what he did (he blew up his marriage and neglected his child) and all of that…he sadly blames on his sexuality.

Harrow feels he never deserved that ring. 

That’s what this line tells us.

That’s some pretty dark subtext right there. But it’s as clear as day that this is Harrow’s main issue – the thing that he’s struggling with. (And boy, does season two up the ante on that monstrous angle when it comes to his bisexuality. It’s pretty brilliant, actually. And heartbreaking, of course, to think that anybody would think that about their own sexual orientation. In any case, if you like 19^th-century Gothic horror stories, you will like season two. Watch out how the theme of the monstrous and abominable is subtextually used there!)

So, there you have it: The reason why the subtext seems to jump around from episode to episode and the connection between the three main themes of the season.

And that’s what episodic storytelling can do for you!

That’s what’s so brilliant about it when compared to a serialized format: You can take very different subtextual threads and put them into different episodes, then combine them and spin them around each other (like in that chimaera episode). Structurally speaking, an episodic format is a dream come true.

Now, does this show treat its abuse storyline well?

Well, to be honest…No, it doesn’t.

We all understand that the ideal treatment of this dark topic would, of course, be one in which the main protagonist of the show is the abuse survivor him- or herself. This story still focuses too much on a male character’s agony and his revenge plot to take out the abuser of a loved one.

An ideal story would give you a Simon-or-Fern type of character and make them the main protagonist. It would give us their struggle, not their lover’s or father’s fight against evil. And it would unapologetically tell us about the fact how this abuse survivor takes out the abuser in the end.

But I’d say, all in all, it’s more of a ‘glass-half-full’ than a ‘glass-half-empty’ show. 

Does it treat its abuse storyline well?

Well, it does at least take it out of the subtext. So, there’s that. (Yes, ‘Young Royals’, I’m looking at you!)

And again, the story of a father and his daughter is rare enough to be intriguing. The fact that Fern wasn’t just ‘fridged’ off-screen prior to the start of the show (the way it’s often done with wives and girlfriends) is certainly a plus. You actually get to see her, and she’s an important character on the show. She will stay on as the second-most important character after Harrow right until the end of season three.

So…all in all, my verdict here is: Glass half full, basically.

Well, and here’s also where we get our ultimate dilemma as viewers:

What do we like more (or less)? A sexual abuse storyline that remains in the subtext forever? Or a bisexuality backstory that remains in the subtext forever?

In ‘Young Royals’, we have a show that writes some brilliant subtext about an abuse storyline…and then leaves that storyline buried in the subtext, never explicitly addressing it in the text.

In ‘Harrow’, we get a show that pulls that abuse storyline out of the subtext and gives us a satisfying reveal.

But then, ‘Harrow’ keeps shtum about the sexual orientation of its main protagonist. His bisexuality never makes it out of the subtext. (And no, I can tell you right now, it won’t be turned into plain text in season two or three either. The two writers of this show decided to keep that whole bisexuality angle strictly subtextual.)

‘Young Royals’, on the other hand, doesn’t hesitate to show us the sexuality of any of its protagonists.

So, we get almost a negative/positive photographic image here: What’s revealed in one show remains hidden in the other and vice versa.

Why is that?

Well, we could talk a lot about the genres being different or the two shows being filmed on opposite sides of the globe, but ultimately I think that whole question comes down to the respective target audience of these two shows. If anything, the difference between these two shows tells us something about how segmented the viewing market has actually become and how consciously this is being taken into account by the higher-ups of any network or streaming platform.

The target demographics are just very, very different.

‘Harrow’ targets a pretty broad cross-section of the population: people who like murder mysteries. (That’s anyone from your average construction worker to your elderly grandma who likes to watch something about a nice grizzly murder over her cup of tea.) These viewers expect to see stories about crime. And while they might flinch at the mention of sexual abuse (especially in the context of a minor being the victim), they will still ultimately nod their heads along with the story and sigh that, yes, sadly these awful cases happen sometimes in real life, too. They expect crime, so they get it.

Here’s what they don’t expect: a lead who’s not straight.

Far be it from me to call this type of demographic homophobic. I’m sure most of them are lovely people. And they certainly don’t have a problem seeing a wholesome gay side character (like Simon van Reyk, for example). Constant whining about homophobia is actually one of my least favourite traits in people; there’s a reason why there are overwhelming majorities in favour of marriage equality in pretty much all Western countries. Those viewers are the kind of people who are supportive neighbours, friends and colleagues, and we all know so, so many of them. But here’s the thing: When these people sit down at the end of a hard day, when they want to just relax on the couch and watch some brilliant detective-type of genius who solves puzzles, they don’t want that main character to have a tortured-soul type of identity crisis about his sexuality. They don’t want to deal with same-sex desire in a lead. It’s okay if it happens with a side character. And if any other character were to say anything homophobic to this side character, they would all frown and instinctively understand that the homophobe is the baddie in the story because tolerance and respect largely reflect their values, too. But they don’t want to have to actually deal with any of this in episode after episode.

If they saw a television series that’s specifically marketed as an LGBT-show, they would never even consider clicking on it; they wouldn’t watch it. They’d say, “Well, that’s a show for the gays. And that’s totally okay. But it’s clearly not advertised as something that’s for me.”

So, a writer who actually wants exactly that sexual identity crisis to be the main struggle of their lead character has no choice but to hide that in the subtext. Which is clearly what happened here: The sexual abuse fit the crime mystery genre. Harrow’s ongoing sexual identity crisis did not. That’s why one of these things remains hidden in the subtext and the other one is revealed to us.

With ‘Young Royals’ the story is a bit different: It is specifically marketed as an LGBT-show. That’s pretty much the first thing you see in the synopsis before you even click on it. So, this show is specifically marketed to a more diverse audience. This audience is also probably younger and skews female (if I were to guess). But the target demographic isn’t by far as broad as the one you can get with a crime drama.

That’s why ‘Young Royals’ can show us people with different sexual orientations and even make sexuality the textual core struggle of its main protagonist.

It says so on the tin, so if you click on it, you’re getting what you wanted to see, right?

Which again brings me to the following question: Did the creators of ‘Young Royals’ feel they couldn’t do that with an abuse storyline?

I know there will always be viewers who will say, “Well, perhaps one of the network suits interfered and pressured the writers into changing course.”

Personally, I don’t think that’s what happened here.

‘Young Royals’ is already pretty dark. You have the theme of sexual abuse in the ‘August-and-the-video’ storyline already.

Make no mistake, ‘Young Royals’ is no ‘Heartstopper’. And it’s certainly not fluffy. Not even in the slightest. It deals with some really dark stuff right from the start. Even in its plain text: Drugs, mental health issues, fathers who throw their sons against the wall in a fit of rage…

And you can just add to that the fact that Simon’s backstory didn’t have to be presented in a very graphic way. I think ‘Harrow’ treads rather lightly in that respect, as well; we are never explicitly shown what happened between Fern and her abuser, for example. Most of the graphic stuff is left in the subtext. We just see her father’s anguish after he figures it all out.

A similarly well-handled reveal would have been possible on ‘Young Royals’, too. I’m sure of it. (And keep in mind that this is Netflix we’re talking about. Well, and ‘Young Royals’ isn’t exactly a lighthearted, fluffy, fuzzy story, to begin with.)

Feel free to disagree with me, but personally, I’m certain this was a deliberate artistic choice by the writers. They didn’t want to disclose any of it, because right from the start, they knew this abuse storyline was only going to serve a metaphorical function. That’s it. I don’t have to like it, but I don’t want to invent any conspiracy theories about network interference to come up with an excuse for them. They decided to do it in this way. I’m not going to make any excuses for them.

And who knows…Maybe some ten or twenty years from now, Lisa Ambjörn will tell us why she felt she had to write an abuse storyline into the subtext of her hit show and why she then never put that abuse storyline into the text itself.

In any case, I hope watching this other show, ‘Harrow’, provided you with some much-needed proof that you weren’t ‘seeing things’ when you watched ‘Young Royals’, that that abuse subtext is absolutely there and that this really is the way subtext is typically written into a screenplay. You could probably see that in the way ‘Harrow’ employs all the same tools of storytelling we had already talked about in the case of ‘Young Royals’ (mirror characters, mirror scenes, etc.). And some of the metaphors on ‘Harrow’ are even the same ones as on ‘Young Royals’ or are at least used in a very similar way.

Simon’s abuse story on ‘Young Royals’ is 100 % there. It’s real. It’s not something we’ve made up. And the way it is written is exactly the way I’d expect something like this to be written into the subtext of a screenplay. It’s exactly what ‘Harrow’ and a million other shows do, as well.

Obviously, there’s much, much more to the first season of ‘Harrow’. If you want, we can, of course, come back to it some other time.

But here’s your final little treat for today:

You did, of course, work out that Simon van Reyk, Harrow’s ever-so-handsome assistant, is an allegorical character, didn’t you?

He’s an allegorical character representing…well, that other ‘side’ of Harrow’s sexuality. The ‘side’ that’s hidden. The side that Harrow is repressing. (That’s why Simon is gay, not bisexual, by the way: He is one ‘half’ of a ‘two-sided’ sexual orientation, so to speak.)

There’s a ton of clues that this is, indeed, what Simon van Reyk represents on the show. (I mean, the fact that Simon is the one to figure out what Harrow did and is specifically involved in covering up the part where Harrow cut off Robert’s ring finger with the ring Harrow felt Robert, i.e. he himself, didn’t deserve, speaks for itself, right?)

But here’s a fun clue from episode six of season one (the case of the Chinese multimillionaire, who so clearly reflects the fact that Harrow thinks of his own bisexuality as something monstrous):

In that episode, Soroya (the woman Harrow is literally sleeping with, remember?) asks, in a somewhat perplexed tone, why Simon is allowed to play with Harrow’s records.

We have a very subtle ‘music’ metaphor on this show, and, yes, music represents love here, as well.

So, Soroya is subtextually asking why Simon (read: that hidden ‘side’ of Harrow’s sexuality) is allowed anywhere near Harrow’s metaphorical ‘music’.

Cool, right?

To which Simon replies that Harrow says that Simon is on his ‘monthly’. 

Harrow then clarifies that that means that it’s Simon’s turn to pick the record they’re going to listen to in the exam room, which apparently only happens once a month. And then he adds that Simon won that privilege in a fierce contest with Harrow: They tried to establish who could sit in the freezer for a longer period of time.

Do you see it?

Once a month (probably not literally, but rather figuratively speaking, i.e. very, very rarely)...Harrow allows Simon van Reyk (i.e. the homosexual ‘half’ of his sexuality) to take over and define the metaphorical ‘music’ in his life.

This is specifically a metaphor about love, not sex. So, this isn’t about Harrow’s clandestine hookups with men that happen off-screen and entirely subtextually. This is about the fact that sometimes Harrow allows himself to experience romantic feelings for men, to fall in love with another man.

And why is Simon van Reyk allowed to wield this power?

He won it in a contest with Harrow!

They both sat in a freezer, which is a nice metaphor for a closet, don’t you think? One that comes with the added bonus of, well, freezing feelings forever, of keeping them frozen, to be defrosted at some later point in life.

Well, and Harrow didn’t manage to stay in this freezer-closet for all that long. Simon van Reyk managed to outlast him: Harrow is still keeping Simon, i.e. that other ‘side’ of his sexuality, in the closet even while he himself is sometimes acting on his urges (i.e. isn’t acting strictly inside that closet). That’s a brilliant image: one where you yourself act outside of the closet even though your sexuality essentially stays hidden on the inside. It’s very clever…and very sad.

Add to that the fact that Harrow refers to these rare moments where Simon is allowed to pick the metaphorical ‘music’ as his ‘monthly’, and you get the full picture: Harrow thinks of these romantic feelings that he sometimes feels for other men as something girly and disgusting. He’s making disparaging remarks about it and is comparing it to the function of menstruation (in dude-speak that means: necessary, but disgusting; icky stuff that only girls should do). And Soroya even replies that she’s not sure if she should be more offended by that or Simon; she says that this is offensive to everyone: Because with a guy who frames his own same-sex feelings as something akin to menstruation, it’s clear that the internalized homophobia comes with a whopping case of sexism, too. If you say, “It’s girly and icky to have feelings for men if you’re a man,” you’re essentially doing both: You’re describing homosexuality as disgusting and putting down women at the same time. 

It’s all very sad, actually.

In the end, however, you have to remember that that ‘side’ of Harrow’s sexuality literally refers back to music. That’s how strong it is!

Simon van Reyk.

The name ‘Simon’ translates as ‘listen’. And ‘van Reyk’ is the name of a contemporary Australian composer.

Listen to the composer.

That’s what that homosexual ‘half’ of Harrow’s sexuality is literally called.

That side of Harrow is literally what’s composing the ‘music’ inside of him.

~fin~