COME OUT TO PLAY

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The pilot in brief:

For fifteen years mild-mannered, legal clerk Jackie, late fifties, has been tormented by injuries - both physical and mental - sustained when the family car plunged into a river, killing her husband and sweeping her five-year-old son out to sea.

When Jackie succumbs to an unorthodox medicine given to her by a mysterious oriental apothecary, it miraculously assuages her physical pain. But the deep sleep it induces is punctuated by nightmares of retribution and rough justice. In the light of day they become all too real and a bloody trail of purging the guilty seems to lead to her door. She begins to catch unexpected glimpses of a willowy, younger woman – reflected in a car window, in the eyes of a friend. Horrified at who she is becoming, she destroys the jar of medication. But then fragmented memories of the car crash begin to hit her – and the recollection of her son being lifted alive from the wreckage, instead of swept out to sea by the river.

Torn between finding her son and quelling her vigilante alter-ego, she phones her life-long friend Detective Inspector Arthur Shaw. When the operator asks for her name, she replies…

“Jacqueline…. Jacqueline Hyde”. (Jekyll & Hyde.)

With her back to a mirror, we see the willowy, younger woman’s reflection looking out and over her shoulder. The devilish smile promises so much more as we – and Jackie – begin to realise that more than fate has shaped her life.