At the beginning of
The End, the exceptional new Australian comic-drama about how we confront the difficult realities of both life and death, Edie Henley (Harriet Walter) does her best to take her own life. The sequence has a shocking alacrity and a clockwork mirthfulness – you’re jolted upright, but compelled to laugh at Edie’s exasperation when she realises she’s battered but definitely still breathing. It’s a highwire act of tonality: the series is uncompromising, but its blows are illuminating.
A widower and breast cancer survivor, Edie is shipped off to the Gold Coast and a place in a retirement village that’s a gilded hospice secured by her daughter, Kate Brennan (Frances O’Connor), a doctor who specialises in palliative care. Kate is “ethically bound” to keep her patients alive, even when they want to die, while the indignant Edie is insistent that she’s preparing for another go at suicide. This stand-off soon comes with euthanasia drugs, and startling examples of how some in their difficult final days see death as a release.