'Unforgotten' Recap: Season 6 Episode 6

Unforgotten is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous episode and previous seasons.
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As Marty walks through Juliet’s empty house, having picked the lock with a hammer and screwdriver, Jess appears with police to arrest him for trespassing – the person who saw him loitering outside must have reported him to Juliet and the police. He asks if his mom died from her pill overdose. She’s alive, unconscious in the hospital. 

Marty tells the detectives that he just wanted to offer condolences to Taylor for the loss of her father. He admits that he did want to hurt Gerry when he broke into his house a week before Gerry disappeared years ago, but Taylor talked him out of it. 

Gerry’s cellphone was in Ilford, where Marty had a flat, when it called a brewer with whom Gerry was supposed to meet on the day he disappeared. He left a voicemail that was definitely his voice, although the brewer found it inappropriate and odd that he called her “babe” in the voicemail. 

But Marty has absolute recall of his schedule on the days around Gerry’s disappearance, and on both of them he watched TV and then watched airplanes take off from the airport. The detectives are confident they’ll find him on the airport’s CCTV, given the specificity of his remembrances.

What about Mel? She finally admits to the police that Gerry was physically abusive. And she hit him back on February 12, 2021 – her birthday, and the night she finally ended her affair with him. That’s how his blood got on her jacket. He demanded that night that she give him a substantial sum of money (to pay off his debts), threatening to expose their affair – and that he got her pregnant and she had an abortion, despite being a pro-life, conservative media personality. This is the one truly terrible thing she believes she has done; she lied to the Irish priest with whom she was sleeping that she gave the child up for adoption. 

She didn’t have the money to pay Gerry and refused him. He eventually reduced his blackmail demand, and she offered to meet him and transfer the money on February 24, the day he was reported missing. But he never showed up, and she moved to Ireland soon after. She never met Juliet in person, although Juliet did call her once about a year before Gerry’s disappearance and threaten to ruin Mel’s life over the affair. 

And Asif? The detectives have tracked down the Afghan family for whom he served as a translator in their dispute with Gerry over the mold in the apartment they rented from him. Asif encouraged them to complain about the mold, but Gerry never fixed it. Their 18-month-old child eventually got sick from the mold, was admitted to the hospital, and died two days before Gerry disappeared. Asif knew about the death – he translated for the family to the doctors – and loved Jamal, the boy who died. 

Asif admits to the detectives that he went to confront Gerry at the pub a couple months before he disappeared and found Gerry exemplifying compassion and kindness while hosting a lunch for the homeless. Asif realized that Gerry could be empathetic – and chose not to be towards the refugees who rented from him, because he didn’t see them as human. So when Jamal was admitted to the hospital, Asif went to the pub to show Gerry a photo. Gerry intimidated him and tried to hit him, but Asif was in better shape and knocked Gerry out instead. This is the assault that Gerry reported. 

The detectives believe that Asif is a good person, and release him. His partner Sam has taken full responsibility for housing Hassan, another Afghan who just came to the UK illegally with the help of Asif. Sam will probably be decommissioned from the army, but Asif will be safe from charges to continue becoming a citizen, which is more important to Sam. He proposes; Asif accepts the ring and says yes.

Marty is also released – the detectives believe he needs to be with his mother. She has awoken and admitted to taking the pills herself - she wanted to release Marty from the “burden” she believed she was so that he could get better help. Her home nurse tells Marty that they can both get better help at home once his mother is healthy enough to return there, and Marty happily agrees to accept it. 

The man who interrupted someone seemingly throwing something into the marsh where Gerry’s body was found has checked his diary and found that the event took place in the early morning of February 24 – before Gerry was reported missing and before his voice was on a voicemail to the brewer. That means the car caught on video at the parking lot was probably used to dispose of Gerry’s body, and someone managed to make it appear that he was still alive later.

The license plate of that car doesn’t exist, suggesting it had been altered with bits of tape. Comparing it to the license plates of all of the suspects’ cars, the detectives find that Juliet’s plate could easily be turned into the one on video. 

When the detectives approach Juliet, she agrees to tell them what happened, in order to keep her daughter Taylor out of it. Her marriage with Gerry was broken, the split driven by his descent into right-wing conspiracy theories. They fought frequently, but didn’t divorce for a number of reasons, chiefly Taylor. 

He got home late on February 22 and they got into a fight. Taylor was asleep in her room upstairs. He got physical, as he often did, pushing Juliet and pulling her hair. She sat down to cut vegetables in order to de-escalate things. He suddenly punched the back of her head while she was chopping, and she instinctively turned around and stabbed her knife into his leg. She then rushed to lock herself in a bathroom while he raged. 

She stayed inside for a long time to make sure he had calmed down, even after he went quiet. When she emerged, he was dead in a puddle of blood on the floor. 

She couldn’t risk going to prison and leaving Taylor without parents, so she carefully cleaned things up, locked Gerry’s body in his office, and went about a normal routine the following day. While Taylor was at a playdate after school, Juliet dismembered Gerry, careful not to leave a trace, locking the pieces in his office again. After Taylor came home and then went to bed, Juliet drove the body to the marsh to dispose of it. She then played a recording of a voicemail from Gerry to her in a call to the brewer he was supposed to meet, and reported Gerry missing that night, pushing the idea to the police that Gerry had been killed by men from whom he borrowed money. 

Jess realizes Juliet’s timeline is off: Gerry’s phone ordered takeout to his home in the evening on February 22, but Juliet said he got home late, after dinner. Why would she admit to everything but lie about the timeline?

The detectives speak to Taylor off the record. She says she heard Gerry hit Juliet often. Whatever her mom has admitted to doing, it was in self-defense.

She only saw the violence once, a few days before Gerry disappeared, when she was 11. Taylor heard shouting on February 22, and for some reason decided to go downstairs. She saw Juliet on the floor, being stomped on by Gerry. Taylor thought he was going to kill Juliet, so she grabbed a knife from the table and jabbed it into his leg. Juliet became calm and brought Taylor upstairs to her room, gave her a bath, and read to her until she fell asleep. The next morning, there was a treat by Taylor’s bed; Juliet said her dad had left it for her and forgiven her. 

Gerry bled to death after his daughter stabbed him, not his wife. Taylor has no idea, thanks to Juliet’s desperate cover-up. 

Sunny and Jess debate what to do: they can let Juliet take the blame, as she is trying to do, and ignore the truth; or they can tell the truth and hope that prosecutors don’t charge Taylor, leaving Taylor to live with the truth. There is no record of their informal conversation with Taylor. Sunny says it’s Juliet’s decision – they don’t want to live with the weight of that on their own shoulders.

Juliet decides to go with the truth – and the prosecutors choose to charge neither her nor Taylor. 

Mel also decides to tell the truth, using her final broadcast before her firing for “moral turpitude” to say what she has wanted to for a while: to appeal to the better angels of her audience. Afterwards, she goes back to the hospital where her ex-fiance is convalescing, with a smile on her face.

Jess has decided to fully end things with her philandering husband Steve. He has taken a rental around the corner from their home, and Jess’ mother was at their home when he picked up stuff from it. Her mother is worried about him.

So Jess goes to check on him at his new place – and sees him on the patio of a pub across the street, smiling and bringing a drink to a woman. Jess leaves without him seeing her.

After ghosting Sunny for a bit, Leanne meets with him and tells him that she likes him – but panicked after kissing him at the end of a drunken night. She has been married before, and has a daughter – but walked out on her husband and child 24 years ago and hasn’t seen them since. She leaves Sunny to absorb this information and decide if he still wants to try dating her.

He does, as he later tells her in a voicemail. We all wish we had done things differently.