Doctor Foster unexpectedly gripped the nation with its first series: a whopping ten million of us tuned into the dinner-party-from-hell finale and Suranne Jones won a Bafta for her wolfish performance as Gemma.
The drama centred around what, at first, appeared to be a happily married couple. Gemma, a GP, and Simon, a property developer played by Bertie Carvel, had a son called Tom and lived together in the fictional town of Parminster.
But smooth and simple suburban life doesn’t make for good drama. And when brunette Gemma discovered a stray blonde hair on her husband’s jacket, her life began to unravel at an alarming pace.
Simon’s mistress, it transpired, was Kate (Jodie Comer), the 23-year-old daughter of the Fosters’ friends. Disturbingly, everyone in Gemma’s small community seemed not only to know about this two-year affair, but to be helping Slimy Simon get away with it!
But did Gemma confront her husband with everything she knew? No. She wanted leverage. Gemma told Simon she had her suspicions, giving him a chance to come clean, but when he dismissed it so easily and continued to lie she decided to let her anger grow in secret, and to slowly build her case against him to get her revenge.
Gemma’s investigation into her cheating husband took many forms…
Ignoring all of the ethics she learned in medical school, she made Kate one of her patients, meaning that she found out before Simon that his lover was pregnant with his child.
Gemma also decided to sleep with Simon’s smarmy accountant (and next-door neighbour) Neil, so she could blackmail him and find out about the state of her husband’s finances. Which, it turns out, were abominable.
Her self-restraint, astonishingly, endured throughout the series, with Gemma continuing to play happy families while she plotted against her cheating spouse.
It all built up to an unbelievably tense dinner party at Kate’s parents’ house, where Gemma (who knew everything) and Simon were sat down with Kate and her parents (who knew nothing).
Gemma exposed the affair before anybody had time to digest their meal. In retaliation, Kate called her a bitch, to which Gemma replied with that killer line: “Bitch is right. I’m a wolf tonight.”
Getting her sweet revenge, Gemma also told Simon that she had slept with neighbour Neil. She then deliberately led him to believe that their son, Tom, had gone missing and that she had hurt him with her medical scissors.
She had wanted her husband to feel the pain of losing everything. Clearly he did because he went on to smash her face into the patio door.
Simon and Kate scarpered into the sunset together (well, moved to London) and Gemma divorced her husband. The end.
Except it wasn’t. Series two sees smug Simon and Kate move back to Parminster, setting off a dramatic chain of events as Gemma struggles to deal with the fact her ex seems to have emerged from the mess without a scratch. We can’t wait.
from Radio Times https://ift.tt/2Om3r1x
