Binge-watching Inside No. 9 last summer is one of the best viewing decisions I’ve ever made. Within just a few days, I was three series in and the show had become one of my all-time favourites and, though some episodes are weaker than others and some of their experiments feel very niche, I don’t think the show has ever had a bad episode, a remarkable feat for a genre-bending anthology show written by just two people.
It was a good time to get fully caught up, since Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton announced, very fittingly, that the show’s ninth series would be its last. They’ve described that the door is ‘ajar’ rather than closed but regardless, this is most likely the last full series we will get of Inside No. 9. So if this is truly the end, then they’ve finished what they started and did a great job at keeping up – a tremendously consistent, risky and creative run of episodes.
The final series kicked off with Boo To A Goose, probably the darkest opening episode Pemberton and Shearsmith have given us throughout the show. Set on an underground train, Boo To A Goose initially presents itself as a morality play – a bunch of strangers board the train, and in typical Inside No. 9 fashion we have a lot of quirky outcasts and boisterous arseholes, but soon a woman’s wallet goes missing and tensions rise. It’s definitely good at this, with the acting from everyone being on-point and the train setting helping to offer the necessary claustrophobia in this situation, but what really sent it over the edge was the final five minutes, a phenomenal twist that turns the episode from a simple drama to a terrifying Orwellian piece of dystopian sci-fi.
The best twists and third-act reveals not only work within the context of the story, but also elevate what has come before, and this definitely does that. The episode becomes much more harrowing, downbeat and genuinely quite scary, and I would very much recommend rewatching this one with the added context of how it ends. I rewatched it just a few days after and I enjoyed it even more.
The next episode continues this darkness throughout the entire narrative. The Trolley Problem, named after the ethical thought experiment, is a similarly confined piece and instantly feels eerier, thanks to the setting of a countryside house on a stormy night, which straight away seems like bad news. This isn’t really a horror episode though, rather half-an-hour of confused loyalties, devastating secrets and earth-shattering reveals. Aside from a couple of voice snippets, this is a two-hander between Shearsmith and Pemberton, who act their socks off here as two strangers who begin to open up and bond… a bond which breaks in terrifying fashion. The last episode may have had a dark ending with its sudden shift into a dystopia narrative, but The Trolley Problem has one of the most shocking and harrowing endings to an Inside No. 9 episode that I can think of.
After two fairly dark episodes to open the series, Mulberry Close certainly plays up the comedy a bit more. It’s still got its darker elements, but there’s some moments of farce and cringe comedy here that are always a treat in Inside No. 9. This was also another visually creative episode – like how Cold Comfort from Series 2 was told through CCTV and webcams, and Dead Line told its story through the premise of a live broadcast, the events of Mulberry Close are presented through a door-cam, and this leads to many creative uses of visual humor and sound design, as we hear (but don’t see) what’s going on inside the house. Lights will suddenly come on in neighboring houses, people walking by will give a strange expression, and we start to connect things in the plot. It’s genius storytelling from Pemberton and Shearsmith, and the ending is both disturbing and genuinely funny, probably the hardest I laughed all series.
But seriously guys, making the bus episode wouldn’t have killed you.
I feel a bit sad that I didn’t really like CTRL, ALT, ESC, since everyone in the fandom seems to love it. However, this was my least favourite of the series and I found it to be a bit of a mess. The actual idea of a family doing an escape room, as an attempt to bond with each other again, is a really nice one and it’s great to see Katherine Kelly in this, but I found that it wildly shifted between genres in a way that wasn’t as seamless as Inside No. 9 usually is.
This was the most emotionally-charged episode of the series, with Pemberton playing an escape room-obsessed dad trying to repair bonds with his eldest daughter who is leaving for university, and while that emotional core was really nice the elements of horror later on felt like they were impeding on this quite sweet story too much, and the ultimate twist that this is all playing about in Pemberton’s head, as his attempt to survive in a coma, was well-intentioned but ham-fisted. Katherine Kelly was great though, as were the actresses playing the couple’s two daughters. I just feel like it was tonally unfocused and a little disorganised.
Luckily the fifth episode, Curse Of The Ninth, brings us back onto more focused ground. It’s a traditional ghost story set in a country mansion, with the little Inside No. 9 quirks coming in the form of blindingly obvious double entendres and innuendo that did help to set this apart. Shearsmith is very funny here, but the second half is definitely some of the scariest moments Inside No. 9 has ever had, with some really cool jump scares and a wonderfully nasty ending. I also liked how this and the previous episode drew attention to the number 9 itself. There was some slight dabbling in the meta that Inside No. 9 has done before, with some characters breaking the fourth wall – but still it was cool to see it applied in a different way here.
This leads me really nicely into the last episode, Plodding On, which stands a very good chance of being the last episode of Inside No. 9 we ever get. This episode was very secretive up til broadcast, with no promo images and a very vague synopsis, which led people to wonder if we were going to get another “fakeout” episode, like with Dead Line and 3 By 3. However, since we had seen no footage from the episode, there was nothing for Shearsmith and Pemberton to fake us out with, so I just started watching the last episode having no idea what I was going to get. What I got was pure meta.
Pemberton and Shearsmith play fictionalised versions of themselves at the Inside No. 9 wrap party, alongside various guest stars from across the show’s history including, in a very cool detail, Katherine Parkinson, who guest starred in the very first episode of the show. There’s many in-jokes and references to past episodes but nothing that felt too smug or alienating, and Plodding On actually works really well as a story of a failing friendship – Steve and Reece are drifting apart, with Reece wanting to do another show together but Steve readying himself for a major drama role. You don’t need much context about them as people and as creatives for this story to work, and I found it a sweet if slight way to wrap up the show. They couldn’t just end it on a normal anthology episode, or do a mad live fakeout again. They had to play up on the show’s passionate fanbase, and this was a fun if predictable way to do that.
So I was very happy with the final series of Inside No. 9. It was good to see Steve and Reece go out with one of their most consistent runs, and six final reminders of just how genius and inventive the show could be. I got into the show fairly late, bingeing it all over a month after the eighth series had just finished, but even if I only got to experience one full series with everyone else, I’m glad the show didn’t end on a whimper. Inside No. 9 has become one of my favourite shows, and I want to see more TV like it as soon as I possibly can, even if I know the chance of it being as good are very slim.
Inside No 9 is available to watch (in the UK) on BBC iPlayer
