‘Down Cemetery Road’ Team Breaks Down Shocking Death Not in Book — Is [Spoiler] Also Dead?

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Down Cemetery Road Season 1 Episode 7 “Lights Go Out.”]

For Ruth Wilson, the Wednesday, December 3, episode is the best one of Down Cemetery Road‘s first season. It’s easy to see why: Sarah (Wilson) and Zoe (Emma Thompson) finally find Dinah (Ivy Quoi), the young girl who went missing after an explosion. But there’s no time to enjoy that moment or even breathe — because by the end of the penultimate episode, one character whose death isn’t in the book (he’s left dying) is gone, and another’s fate is up in the air.

It’s an action-packed episode, which Wilson enjoyed, with all the characters converging on an island. Sarah, Zoe, and Downey (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) are determined to protect Dinah, while Amos (Fehinti Balogun) has much more nefarious reasons for hunting her down. What results is a showdown to the death between the two men, the women caught in the middle and trying to make their escape across a beach that does have landmines, and a shocking cliffhanger that sees only two people making their way back to the mainland on a boat.

“It’s a brilliant episode,” Wilson raves to TV Insider. “I think it’s the best episode of the whole season, and it flies by and it’s fun. It’s fun seeing these two women who, this is not what they do on a daily [basis] and they suddenly have to sort of woman up and take it on.” As she points out, their goal was to find Dinah, and doing so “does crescendo the episode.”

Below, Ruth Wilson, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, and Mick Herron, whose books the series is based on and who serves as an executive producer, break down the episode’s big moments.

Why Downey died in the TV show

At the end of Herron’s book, Downey is just still dying of the same condition that affects all the soldiers. On the show, Amos kills him.

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“A TV show probably demands more dramatic moments than a novel might,” Herron explains. “In a novel, you can get pathos or knowledge about a character from quite passive things happening, whereas on the TV screen you really do need a couple of showdowns, especially towards the end of the run. And with a villain like Amos there being played so brilliantly, it made more sense from a dramatic point of view to show the death in that way.”

And while he didn’t die in the pages of the book, Herron confirms “there was never going to be any hope” for Downey.

Because of the book, Stewart-Jarrett knew what was coming for his character. He also found it useful to read the book because its text gave him more background on his character as a soldier. Knowing his character’s fate was “weird,” he admits. “You do mourn the character in a different way and then you have to go through [it].”

But, as he points out, Downey’s entire arc was building to his death, whether it was, like the book left him, from his neurological condition or, like on the show, murder. But all that matters to him, as we see, is Dinah’s survival. It’s what he sees as his “purpose.”

“I felt like Dinah being safe is, Downey is now allowed to die,” explains Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. “It didn’t matter what Amos said. As long as he’s talking, Dinah is safe. As long as he’s with Downey, Dinah is safe. … It’s a very heroic moment. He knows that he’s going to die. The whole point is that he loses and that she wins.”

There was a sense of “urgency” while filming his death scene, the star shares. Not only was it very cold, but they were also running out of time and light. But that gave the scene what it needed. He also likens the moment, which he found “really sad” and “hard” to film, to another death scene — but not necessarily the one that it’s supposed to. “As you go up to the steps, it’s almost like a huge platform. I just kept on thinking of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe,” Stewart-Jarrett admits. “They were obviously thinking it’s meant to be almost like Christ-like in a way, the sacrifice. But I was like, yeah, it’s like Aslan.”

Sarah and Downey meet when he kidnaps her to save her life after one of the men in the group Amos is part of, Rufus (Ken Nwosu), posing as her neighbor, tries to kill her. Still, the two did begin to bond over their episodes together, and so she is “devastated by his death,” says Wilson. But it’s not something she has time to process — as soon as she sees Amos and realizes what likely happened, she has to focus on being on the run to protect Dinah.

“Mick never puts them in [a romantic relationship], but he gives them — they find intimacy and friendship and connection and trust,” she notes. “What I loved about Sarah is she’s constantly coming across new people that she bonds with or creates relationships with, which reveal parts of herself as the show goes on. And so Downey is someone she learned to respect him and understand. They really learned to trust each other and enjoy each other’s company and become vaguely codependent on each other, weirdly.”

For Stewart-Jarrett, these two characters end up forming a family in a sense with Dinah, even though they’re only briefly with her together. “They deeply, deeply care” about the young girl, he says. That’s why he trusts Sarah to look after her.

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'Down Cemetery Road' Author Explains Why Zoe and Amos Sequence Wouldn't Work in Book

In his mind, that happens after “she wore him down,” Stewart-Jarrett says with a laugh. Downey started out tolerating Sarah, “but he began to need her in the way that she needed an escape from her life and this was adding a certain amount of meaning to her life. He really, truly did need her, and I think that that moment in the hotel where he’s incapacitated, having a fit, she was there for him. She stayed. There’s something about her life force that actually is kind of matching and giving him the energy he needs.”

He says that he and Wilson discussed their mini-arc, which began with him kidnapping her (a term that the actor tells us, laughing, he hadn’t been using but now will be) and led into a “kind of Bonnie and Clyde journey.”

He calls their characters’ dynamic sibling-like. As they “were rolling around in the mud having a fight for the gun and she’s just incredibly strong, I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ She’s like, ‘I have brothers,'” he recalls. “I was like, ‘OK.’ There was that dynamic immediately, which I think is so wonderful. It adds a comedic thing as well of these two people.”

Downey does leave Dinah in the care of Sarah and Zoe, though he and the PI only briefly cross paths. While he would have loved to work with the “legend,” he knows “it made sense” they didn’t share any significant scenes. “They had that moment in the abandoned barracks. It’s almost like a ‘game recognizes game’ moment. I thought they had a connection.”

Is Zoe dead?

The episode ends with Emma Thompson’s Zoe seemingly blown up by landmines on the beach; she sends Sarah and Dinah ahead while she distracts Amos. “It’s all we got,” she points out. From Sarah’s perceptive on the boat with Dinah, it looks like Zoe’s dead. (The series is based on novels centered on her character.)

“She’s not completely sure because she hasn’t seen the dead body, but she’s assuming — she saw her being thrown up in the air,” Wilson tells us. “She’s got the kid, so she has to keep moving. I think she does think in that moment she’s dead or she may be dead.”

Zoe putting herself in danger like she did is just “the nature of the character,” according to Mick Herron. “She will do the right thing, however grumpy she might appear to be about doing it. And one of the clever things about that particular part of the show is that she’s just missed the idea that there are actually any landmines there. She thinks that it’s all fakery. So, that comes as a big surprise to her as well as to the viewer, I think, when things start blowing up all around her.”

He continues, “I think it’s very clear right from the start that Zoe is established as a very resourceful, very capable woman, and we know when she gets involved that she’s going to see things through. She might not be there to be warm and cuddly, but she’s going to do the right thing.”

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Sarah thinking Zoe could be dead comes right after the women had what Wilson calls “probably [their] most reflective moment” together. On the boat on the way to the island, Zoe talks to Sarah about Joe (Adam Godley), her husband who was killed because of this case, in a way we hadn’t seen before that point.

“These aren’t people that would usually be friends. They would not get on. They’re from totally different backgrounds and worlds, different people. And it is often in those places in the middle of nowhere, you’re on a boat, you’re just staring at the horizon when people open up and reveal something of themselves,” Wilson shares. “It is a lovely scene. You haven’t seen Zoe open up much throughout the whole season, and she’s just been on this mission. So to suddenly reflect on why she’s doing it and what the purpose of it is and the meaning and for Sarah to understand and know that she was responsible partly for Joe’s death, that bonds them as well, that there’s been a tragic death in the middle of all this. It brings them together — although it’s a very painful thing for Zoe, for both of them, actually.”

While it is a simple scene, just the two women talking on the boat, it’s key for the characters moving forward. “They know they can trust each other moving on,” Wilson explains. “It’s important to have that scene and to get close for them to understand each other a bit more for [what comes next] to work.”

What did you think of Downey’s death? Let us know in the comments section below.

Down Cemetery Road, Wednesdays, Apple TV