Justice and Truth: Affects of the Andie Bell Case
One of my favourite scenes from the show (granted I fear I say this about most of it) is the scene between Pip and Ravi before Elliot’s arrested. There’s such a difference in what they both want and their ideals and perspectives that I really enjoy. I’ve discussed it in far looser terms while doing my rewatch for Calamity (my rewrite fic), however, I think it’s really interesting that this is one of the few times where we see Ravi disagree with Pip. Their conversation is centred on the truth: who killed Andie Bell, and when Pip tries to argue for the truth, Ravi is the one to say it doesn’t matter. I think this is a really interesting show of how Ravi and Pip are affected by the Andie Bell case in different ways. Pip is the one consumed by it. She wants to know the whys and what happened, but Ravi is the one who has to deal with the fallout and see how Little Kilton felt about everything during the five years.
I vaguely mentioned this when I posted about my favourite parts of the show for my rewrite fic, Calamity (seriously, my list of favourite things is never-ending). However, I just find myself really fond of it and the contrast between Ravi and Pip.
Their conversation is one of the few times that Ravi disagrees with Pip, and it comes after the stakes get too high. Their conversation is about how they didn’t do what they set out to do, and Pip doesn’t want to stop. She wants answers, the truth, and yet when she says that, Ravi tells her it doesn’t matter. People don’t care about the truth. They believe what they want to believe. It’s an oddly cynical look for Ravi, who is typically more positive than Pip, and yet it does make quite the amount of sense. We know that Ravi dropped out of school as soon as he could, and that people don’t try to disguise their dislike for the Singhs because of Sal. Plus, Sal and Ravi look extremely similar, it’s not like Ravi could pretend that he wasn’t Sal’s little brother and he was never allowed to mourn or grieve the loss of his brother, his parents and him were expected to keep their feelings about their family member who was dead, covered up because he had done a terrible thing. I think in a lot of ways this is one of my favourite scenes because of how much it tells us about Ravi, and how the fallout of the case affected him. He doesn’t trust that people aren’t still going to believe his brother was a monster because they did for five years with a confession that he didn’t give and with (in my opinion) pretty not great evidence but the entire town demonised his brother and his parents again and again (at least to me, it seems like from the books and the show that Ravi would care more about how Little Kilton demonised his parents and brother than himself, especially with the argument him and Pip have about Pip being upset when someone treats him badly). Honestly, all of this to me is a really interesting view into how Ravi might not be the most...overtly traumatised from the Andie Bell case. He definitely does have lingering issues from it
On the other hand, Pip doesn’t care about how other people are going to feel about this case. Hell, it’s how she winds up doing the case, she refuses to care about how everyone else is going to react to her doing her epq on this, in the book by directly ignoring the rule of not having contact with either the Singhs or Bells, pretty much immediately after she’s told to and in the show by continuing to work on the case even after Mr. Ward and her mum tell her that she can’t keep doing her epq on the Andie Bell case. She’s told dozens of times to stop, (and in this scene told by Ravi to stop because it’s too dangerous) because above everything, Pip cares about the truth. Obviously, this is a sort of full circle moment, given the later books, but during season one, truth is what Pip cares about. She doesn’t care about the harm it could have on her because she wants answers. She wants to know why Andie died. This is also what she says to Mr. Ward when they’re talking in the interrogation room (...next episode? Episode six, I think), she asks him, “doesn’t he want Naomi and Cara to know he didn’t kill Andie” because you can lose everything, but they’ll still be the truth, the innocence of not committing this murder. And I just think it’s a really fun contrast to Ravi. At the beginning, she has faith in the justice system and in the jury’s ability to believe who’s innocent and who’s guilty. (Admittedly, I have mixed feelings on why she loses that, because I feel like there could’ve been a different way of handling that or setting it up, but that’s a whole other essay in itself) I think what also makes this such an interesting conversation for me is that it’s a fun way of showing how one can be interested and even invested in things like true crime and not entirely understand what it’s like to actually have it happen. Pip is shown to be interested in true crime, and it’s part of why she chooses the Andie Bell project as her epq alongside her guilt/belief in Sal’s innocence, whereas Ravi is the one who has the experience and thus gains more cynicality
