‘Cleverman’ Recap: It’s Time To Go Beyond Bad Men And Sad Women

This is a recap of the latest episode of Cleverman. Spoilers!

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Whatever happens in-between, it’s now well-established that the Cleverman team know how to start and finish an episode. This week, the third episode is framed by Waruu’s bath, where he’s trying to soak out the poison of his actions in the Hairy prison facility (or maybe he’s wallowing in it?) as he watches the GoPro footage over and over and ignores his wife’s pleas to let her in.

It closes with one of the most striking images in the series so far: Waruu, his stance tense, his back to the camera, stands at the window (as he has in previous scenes, gazing out at the moon, the jealous brother). A loud bird crashes and flaps at the closed window and he slams his hand against the glass — a moment of raw frustration in a dim, pink-tiled bathroom, right before an abrupt smash cut to black for the credits.

Waruu’s guilt over killing the guard (keep in mind, we’ve been repeatedly shown just how nasty this bloke was, so we might not feel quite as sorry about a one-note sadist getting his neck snapped) is piled on top of his anger and jealousy over not being chosen as Cleverman. The act was quite possibly fuelled by Waruu’s need to prove he still has power and the potential to be a leader and a fighter for justice. The repeated shots of the moon have a symbolic meaning beyond the usual atmospherics too (a callback to the story that Jimmy told Waruu’s daughter about the jealous moon sulking and hiding from his brother, the favoured sun). Jarrod Slade comes right out and pokes at this wound in his conversation with Waruu.

But the guard’s death has a double purpose here: it reveals more of the dark impulses Waruu apparently works hard to keep in check, and shows that Marcus Graham’s lean and hungry CA boss is more than happy to stoke the public’s fear of Hairy attacks. That is some supervillain shit — and it also puts Waruu in a moral dilemma. He could prove that Hairies weren’t responsible for the guard’s death or mutilation, but only if he’s willing to come forward as the killer.

The show certainly knows how to use Rob Collins to great effect. His combination of boyishness and severity is spot-on and he’s a wonderfully focused presence, but we still need a little more background for the character.

We’ve seen him being cruel to Koen in the flashback to their childhood; he didn’t seem to bat an eye when Harry ripped off his little brother’s finger in the premiere; he was cheating on his wife with someone he didn’t seem to like very much; he could be dismissive of Uncle Jimmy even as he fixated on inheriting his role as Cleverman; and now we’ve seen him snap a man’s neck when he could have just dropped the guard as soon as he lost consciousness. His televised speech last week was a phenomenal moment, but Waruu’s advocacy for his community and for Hairypeople seems to be jostling with an old-fashioned bruised ego when it comes to his motivations. Whether he’s going to completely break bad or reconcile with Koen to fight the CA and the Namorrodor together, it has to be based on stronger character development to really resonate.

The same also applies to Araluen’s story. While Tasma Walton is doing heartbreaking work with little but her eyes and the set of her jaw, forced-prostitution storylines are tough to do both sensitively and effectively, particularly when the character at the centre is still such a cipher. She’s deeply traumatised but has been totally isolated since Jirra’s death and the separation of the family. We learned nearly as much about Frankie’s sympathetic but weak blonde sidekick in their two-minute conversation as we have about Araluen so far.

This arc is based on a crime that still happens to people in the real world and, with the extra lashings of racism, it is truly awful to watch — from horrible Frankie’s cattle prod and the way she calls Araluen “pet”, to the slow realisation that the rumpled bed means we’re likely looking at the aftermath of Araluen’s first “booking”. But the reveal that the client interested in Araluen is the blowhard Immigration Minister himself also makes it feel like a vehicle — a storyline to simply further underscore the hypocrisy of the government at the expense of a female character (and the talented actress playing her) who could be given much more to do. Hopefully this is building to Araluen getting to cattle-prod Frankie in the neck very soon.

Koen’s story is moving oddly slowly, considering he’s the nominal protagonist. We still have no indications as to who the girl he and Blair rescued from the secret government lab is; she was in the morgue, Jimmy breathed something into her and she came back to life, and she was then being studied in the lab. The best guess is that she’s some manifestation of an ancient spirit or elder, from the way she sometimes flickers into appearing as a much older, darker-skinned woman and her ability to shock Koen with some kind of concentrated dose of pure history/story/land/life.

It’s a smart choice to have her only be able to communicate with Koen, telepathically, in a language he doesn’t speak — it reinforces how unprepared and disconnected from his background he is. But we’ve spent about as much time as we need to establishing his reluctance to take on the Cleverman role.

On the bright side, Blair had very little to do and say this week so there were no lines like “awesomeness that is truly bad-arse”. His only role was sitting in the corner, ignoring his girlfriend and best mate having an intense moment behind the bar while he taught the mysterious spirit-girl coaster-flipping.

The show draws out the Slade subplot as well this week. Quite apart from the pregnancy plot (which may or may not be related to Ser Jarrod’s dealings with Uncle Jimmy), Slade all but says he was trying to plug Jimmy’s Cleverman powers into modern technology. For what? To steal them, amplify them, preserve them, monetise them? The trope of the white man who’s been let in on the ancient secrets of an indigenous community’s spiritual tradition is not a new one, and usually comes with a heaping dose of colonialist-capitalist condescension: ‘aren’t they clever, who woulda thunk it, how can I use this for my own benefit and maybe also the benefit of mankind as a whole but mostly just me?’

That Slade rescues a young man from a vicious racist beating, or that he uses his knowledge of the connection between Hairy clans and blood type to save Djukara, doesn’t mean that his intentions are pure; and even if they are, some of the worst damage to Indigenous communities throughout history has been done by white people who Meant Well.

At this halfway point in the first season, there are still a lot of unanswered questions, and they need to start being resolved next week — at least so new cans of worms can be opened up by the revelations. While nobody would object to a bit more of Deborah Mailman’s BS-free Aunty Linda (preferably blazing one down and giving Waruu what-for), the show needs its women with more agency and less tragedy, and a few more men we can really root for despite their flaws.

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Cleverman is on ABC1 at 9.30pm Thursday nights. You can catch up on iView now.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer who tweets from @caitlin_welsh.