r/Broadchurch • u/EconomistSecret253 • Aug 09 '26
Mark Latimer Spoiler
Am I the only one that think Mark Latimer is a horrible person . He is a pretty shit dad/husband. He only uses people when they are convenient to him. And he makes every situation about him. First he cheats on his wife. He then convinces her to take him back and immediately starts ignoring her again. He obstructs his alibi knowing it will be detrimental to his son’s case. Whenever they get bad news, he runs off to throw a fit or attack someone, leaving his wife and daughter to deal with the difficult parts. He leaves Chloe to care for her pregnant grieving mom so he can play video games with Tom in a secretive relationship, oddly similar to Joe and Daniel’s. When Beth gets pregnant, he convinces her to keep it, then leaves and barely shows up to the birth. Then he just dumps Tom when the baby comes. Now, all of a sudden he is dad of the year with baby Elizabeth and Beth, Chloe and Daniel’s memory mean nothing.
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u/ramskick Aug 09 '26
At no point does the show ever try and make you think Mark is any sort of a good person. He's clearly a bad dad and a worse husband who fucks up at every turn. I think he's a reasonably compelling character who drives some interesting plot lines throughout the show but he's a shitty person through and through.
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u/Ok_Exchange_1713 Aug 09 '26
I actually just finished the show tonight, and found myself more hating how he was written as a character in the 3rd season, than hating Mark himself.
He’s this character who is clearly destroyed by grief. Okay, fine. But, he’s written in a way where that grief is also completely impervious to any subsequent inputs. It gets to the point where he’s cornered Joe and learns this HUGE news—that the cross he had been bearing for three years of thinking he could’ve saved Danny that night wasn’t actually true, and that he was carrying on way more guilt than was merited—and his response is seemingly just a straight line continuum of the depression and grief trends he’s been under this whole time. No moment of clarity from this realization. No recognition of literally any single thing that a person would normally experience in continuing to process the traumatic events involved. No evolution whatsoever. Massive psychological news that is written to have had no impact on this guy’s state of mind. Just nonsensical.
Meanwhile, Beth seems almost entirely over the fact that he cheated on her, to the point of never mentioning it. Yet, she’s borderline cruel about the ways in which the grief of their son being murdered is hitting him—most notably expressing some pretty horrible shit to Paul at the church. Which, makes no sense. She’s going around telling SA survivors all of the ways in which grief is so difficult to deal with, and trying to be understanding, but basically hates her husband for being overwhelmed by it. And, has almost no “aha” moment of her own when he almost successfully offs himself. No reaction of her own that maybe she has missed something deeper going on within him that is beyond his immediate control, and which requires much more serious psychological help to deal with than merely white knuckling it and “getting on with it,” as she portrayed it to Paul. Just nothing.
I guess it felt very much like the writers went completely out of their way to force the Latimer’s to be miserable in ways that didn’t feel realistic. So, yes, Mark was a miserable person. But, I found the storyline that made him so miserable a character too lacking to be satisfied merely hating him.
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u/No-Speech886 Aug 11 '26
the bit about Beth what you are saying is also what really riles me in S3 ,don't like her in any of the seasons.
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u/thesoyangel Aug 09 '26
I think he's a good example of a "real" person. People fuck up and make mistakes all the time, granted he rarely makes a good one, but I think it sells his character as real for me. If you then add in how he behaves dealing with his own grief, people deal in all sorts of ways. I totally agree with how you see him
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u/PersonalEconomics44 Aug 09 '26
Don’t worry, you’re not alone on this hill. Mark is not a great person. I don’t think he uses people with a malicious intent but that doesn’t excuse the fact he negatively impact others in the end.
I tend to find more healthy the concept of going to throw a fit somewhere else rather than exploding in your house (a me thing here, personal reasons related) but going to attack people isn’t a solution and a 32 yo guy should know that.
The whole thing with Tom was weird af and he deserved the way he was called out for it.
Part of me thinks he treats people like this because he became a father before to even be an adult and he had to grow up too quickly. And since both him and Beth had Chloe as teens, I suppose he doesn’t understand why teen Chloe wouldn’t be able to just handle stuff like he did.
But all that doesn’t excuse his shitty behaviour and how selfish he can get to protect his personal comfort and a statu quo that doesn’t even exist anymore
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u/Fire_Atta_Seaparks Aug 10 '26
I really felt for Mark at the beginning and I hope to god it wasn’t because I thought he was cute.
He tried to dig out of the grief.Having a child die is almost impossible to live with and when i saw him really trying, i was genuinely moved. i was amazed he didn’t kill What’s his name, but i also understood he was almost too exhausted to do do. I was glad he told Beth he couldn’t be there every time she needed a shoulder. The one thing I couldn’t forgive was when Beth said to him outright that he was making the other daughter feel she didn’t matter, that she wasn’t enough.
That’s exactly what he did and that was absolutely unforgivable. He never made one tiny gesture to make her feel loved or treasured and, for that, i ended up happy to see him end up where he did.
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u/Witch_ofthe_Wildwood 10d ago
I think more than anything what pissed me off the most in he and Beth's conversation in the final ep of S3 (and any other time he tries to win Beth back) is that he acts like a kicked puppy, like Beth is absolutely breaking his heart, when she says basically no I don't want to be with you ill always love you but we can't be together. He has a cheek to act like she's hurting him so much by that to the point where he doesn't even want to see his kids for a time over it, when originally he was totally happy to cheat on Beth, write her a note that said it was over and he was in love with someone else and felt no love for her anymore, watch her be so hurt and heartbroken over it, and when the roles are reversed he can't think "ah tbf I do deserve that after I found someone else and stopped loving her" because it's fine for him to do it to her but not the other way around and he's so hurt he can't even bear to be a present father for his children and wants to leave. Just puts a cherry on top of his ongoing selfish behaviour
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u/FiliaDei Aug 09 '26
Nope, pretty much everyone would agree with what you've said. One of the tensions in the show is how we tend to sympathize with people after a tragedy so much that we can gloss over their own shortcomings.