Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Episode 5: Arabella
Peter Harness has said that he thinks this episode is the best thing he’s ever written. It’s not an unreasonable assertion. This is a precision-engineered piece of television. It starts impossibly big and careens at unrelenting speed towards an equally grandiose conclusion. On each end is a different version of the same event: the cracking of Jonathan Strange. At the outset is the Battle of Waterloo, a sequence one imagines gave Harness his most thorough grounding to date in what writing Doctor Who is like (“What can I have to do the Battle of Waterloo?” “Thirty extras, a courtyard, and a half-dozen CGI shots.”), and one that culminates in Strange breaking his previous assertion that a gentleman could never kill another man. At the end is Strange finally figuring out the secret that Norrell has been keeping from him, and plunging into dangerous obsessions.
In between, meanwhile, is a very carefully subverted fridging. That it is a fridging is difficult to dispute. Arabella is killed in order to give Strange some angst. The entire plot of the episode is literally “Strange goes a bit mad because his wife dies.” It’s as classic a fridging as you can do. Except, of course, that Arabella’s not dead, and all of the scenes of Strange’s angst are necessarily weighed up against this fact. As has been the case since the end of “The Friends of English Magic,” this is a show in which we frequently know more than the characters. And here the nature of the big secret shifts – where it had been the question of what actually happened to Lady Pole, now, as Strange, Secundus, and Honeyfoot all figure out key parts of that, the big secret becomes Arabella’s captivity.
It’s notable, then, just how straight all of Strange’s scenes of angst are played. Nothing in how they are shot or written betrays the secret. Instead, “Arabella” plays out as a normative fridging, except that the audience knows more. This has an interesting effect – it creates a sense of estrangement from the scenes, making the tropes more visible. As, of course, they are meant to be – in a story that has made as much of marginalized populations as Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has, the fridging of a character cannot be read straightforwardly. (Although man, I wish Harness had avoided the temptation to have the last conversation the Stranges have prior to Arabella’s disappearance be about having children, a thuddingly cliche note.)
It also has to be said, it’s very well done. The sense of dread that hangs over the episode’s start, running through to when the Gentleman finally captures Arabella, is a magnificent thing. There’s a lovely twist pulled in naming the episode “Arabella” and then quickly establishing the inevitability of her demise, then having it actually happen early on. One expects Arabella’s “death” to be the cliffhanger (a move that would have made the fridging much less of an object of critique), so the point when it happens becomes, instead, a point where the episode goes weirdly off the rails into something altogether more unsettling.
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