Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Michaela Coel as Kate Ashby ... her performance was a revelation.
Michaela Coel as Kate Ashby ... her performance was a revelation. Photograph: BBC/Forgiving Earth Ltd/Des Willie
Michaela Coel as Kate Ashby ... her performance was a revelation. Photograph: BBC/Forgiving Earth Ltd/Des Willie

Black Earth Rising finale review – slick Rwandan drama signs off in style

This article is more than 5 years old

Hugo Blick’s sprawling, risk-taking thriller dealing with the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide came to an end that was assembled with precision

  • Want to give your opinion? Our series recap has comments open

And so, after eight exhilarating, sometimes confounding weeks, we reach the final episode of Black Earth Rising (BBC Two), a sprawling and boldly executed thriller dealing with the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. If you took notes, now would be a good time to refer to them.

The series was written, produced and directed by Hugo Blick, who reserved a gem of a part for himself as the sleazy, war criminal-representing barrister Blake Gaines. Long gone and much missed (dispatched by his own chauffeur in episode five), Gaines returned in spirit in the form of an envelope bequeathed to his rival Michael Ennis (John Goodman). Inside was an invoice that showed that the genocidaire Patrice Ganimana’s legal bills were being paid by something called the Universal Church of Christ the Peacemaker, a front for a mining company.

Meanwhile, back in Rwanda, Alice (Noma Dumezweni) is having a conversation with her adoptive sister, Madame President. Alice is in handcuffs because the particular atrocity she was trying to highlight with her return to Rwanda was not part of the universally acknowledged massacre of Tutsis by the Hutu majority, but a hushed-up Tutsi reprisal over the border in Congo. Predictably but infuriatingly, the tape recorder on which vital evidence was preserved proved to have no tape in it. (“We should have made more copies,” said Eunice last week; yes, you should have.)

Kate Ashby (Michaela Coel), having already discovered her true history – she was not a survivor of the original genocide, but of the aforementioned reprisal – is in the Congo looking for a mass grave that will prove what took place. A certain mining concern, keen to maintain a steady supply of certified conflict-free diamonds, doesn’t want her to find it.

Blick’s storytelling style could be summed up as “show now, explain later”, and inevitably this last episode was left with a lot of explaining to do. But the necessary knotting of loose ends should not take away from the power of what went before. Throughout, Black Earth Rising has been slick, ambitious, beautifully composed and often jarringly graphic. Brains got blown out. There was a period when someone threw up in almost every episode. The story of the conflict itself was recounted using animated sequences – an easy-to-screw-up idea that was perfectly judged and exquisitely rendered.

The show has rightly received plaudits for giving so many black actors central roles, but it’s also notable for its wealth of older characters. As a story about people coming to terms with events that happened more than 20 years ago, it is also necessarily about the manifold disappointments, regrets and medical problems of late middle age. These were all tackled with honesty, bleak humour and a refreshing lack of dignity. Of course, there was a time early on when none of the main characters seemed safe: the story rolled right over some important people, and everybody else appeared to be dying of something that would claim them before the plot could.

In the end, it was Coel’s role as Kate that held the whole thing together, even though she didn’t appear for long stretches while other stuff got sorted out. Kate was in some ways a symbolic presence – hers was the story everyone else was trying to tell – but Cole infused the character with a sort of cold-burning intensity; the dangerous fury that comes of not knowing who you are and getting perilously close to not caring. If you have never before seen her in anything – or if you had only seen her in her BBC Three series Chewing Gum – the performance was a revelation.

Although assembled with precision, the amazing thing about Black Earth Rising was how consistently it took risks – with style, with composition, with music, with dialogue. Sometimes, it was almost surreally weird; in other moments, characters simply explained the story so far to one another. Occasionally, it seemed to delight in knowing when it had gone too far: at one point Kate climbed into a heating duct to pursue a would-be assassin, before realising what a stupid idea it was – just as most viewers were thinking the same thing.

In this season of televisual overabundance, Black Earth Rising may have demanded too much to keep a big audience across eight weeks, but if you gave up early you made a mistake. According to iPlayer, you have a month to put it right.

Most viewed

Most viewed