Anyone else think Peter Rawlings was a bit of a dick? SPOILERS

I totally agree. At first I thought they were a good couple but as it went on he was always complaining because she didn't spend enough time with him. You cannot always be there every waking hour. He needs to become self sufficent because she has a job she needs to fulfil as an inspector and he'll just have to learn to live w/ it.

I sympathize with him. You have to bear in mind that he was pretty desperate at the time because his business was failing and he a.) needed her support and b.) her comfort. But she shut him out of her life completely. She was also terribly rude with her parents. And the dinner was very important for him to save his business and she could always have said no.

He asked her for a day when he can invite these business prospects over for dinner. Why of all days did she choose a weekday when she's almost always knackered physically and mentally? How about Sat/Sun?

And when she committed to the weekday, she didn't have everything at hand. As she conferred with Peter in the morning, she even had to make a note for herself to get mayonnaise and she's not sure if the avocado would be ripe in time for dinner. Duh? Actually, it was even Jones who did the shopping for her. Of course this was the day she had to go to Oldham and she didn't time herself properly so she missed the right train. She could have come back the next day to talk to the two women.



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I've just seen this show for the first time, and yeah, I have to agree he was unreasonable.

But in the first half of the story, so many people were, not just Peter. Yeah, I know, a personal relationship was a bit different from jealous, competitive fellow emplyees, but watching this I found myself thinking, "Yes OK, we get it, you're piling up the pressure on her, move on!" so often that it really started irritating me.

It's a personal bug-bear of mine when characters are written as doing things just for dramatic effect or for generating conflict that are out of their nature or that on a character level don't make sense for them to do. Peter accused Jane unfairly and irrationally so many times when, as you say, her only real sin was she wasn't thinking of him before herself or her own career. Sometimes people do that, I know, and it furthered the "everything's unfair and all doors are closed for a woman" tone of the story, but so much of it just seemed too contrived.


You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

While we're supposed to be generally sympathetic to our protagonist, the writers make it clear that she has it coming. She is almost entirely self-involved, to the point that any intrusion into what she wants causes her to complain or lash out. This is not attractive. Viz her behavior the night of her father's birthday (in which she not only directs the spotlight away from him and toward herself but also cruelly demeans him when it's discovered he has taped the wrong show) and later when she ignores Peter so that she can watch herself on television. It's all a bit histrionic but the writers are giving support to Peter's coming decision.

One might argue that Peter was too quick to pull the plug on their relationship, but it's fairly clear that she will put her needs and wants first in almost all cases. Who needs that kind of relationship? That she doesn't dwell on his leaving signals a knowing acceptance on her part.

It's also arguable that Peter should have said, "Jane, I get that your job basically consumes everything, and I accept that it's the nature of the beast. However, this is not the kind of relationship I was looking for, so I've got to go. Cheers."

To me, the whole Rawlings leaves Jane storyline felt too compressed. Okay, she ignores her boyfriend and he feels neglected. And she acts like a jerk about the videotape (with her father and her boyfriend) and gets in too late to cook one dinner. But really, someone is going to throw away an entire relationship over those things? If Jane kept up the behavior, it would make perfect sense for her boyfriend to leave, but as it was? I'm not sure exactly what the timeline of the case was, but it felt like Jane and her bf's relationship issues played out over a matter of weeks. I would expect that any person who had a generally good relationship with a live-in boyfriend or girlfriend would at least wait a few months after problems started to leave. Perhaps if Prime Suspect had played out over 8 hours instead of 3.5, the episode writers would have made the relationship problems seem more obviously ongoing instead of sudden, and Jane's bf would have been allotted better motivation to leave?