Rivals turned sharply in Season 2 Episode 6, ending its midseason finale with a death that breaks hard from Jilly Cooper’s books. The hour unfolds over one night as a powerful storm batters the Cotswolds, and by the end Tony Baddingham is left reeling from a devastating loss.
That is a far cry from the run Tony has enjoyed through the first half of the sophomore season, when he kept finding ways to come out on top again and again. David Tennant said the blow leaves him in a difficult place, adding, “It doesn’t leave him in a particularly healthy place.”
The twist matters because this is not just another plot turn in a soap-operatic power struggle. Rivals has been tracking the battle for control between Corinium and Venturer, with Tony at the center of it all, and this episode changes the shape of that fight at the exact point the season is meant to tighten. For readers following the show’s adaptation closely, the death is the kind of departure that can redraw everything that follows, much like a sudden momentum shift in a high-stakes campaign rivalry or the kind of blow seen in a brutal turn before rivals join forces in The Furious clip.
The personal edge to Tony’s collapse is what makes the hour land. Cameron Cook, who once sat by his side at Corinium before extricating herself with Rupert Campbell-Black’s help, had already knocked him down hard at the end of the first season. This time, Tony sounds less like a schemer and more like a man reaching for something steadier, saying of his wife Monica, “I really don’t know where I’d be without her.”
That vulnerability is set against a broader change in tone. Dominic Treadwell-Collins said, “We all have this new confidence, which I think comes across onscreen,” and that confidence is what makes the episode’s final turn sting harder: Tony may have spent the season acting like the man who could outlast everyone, but Episode 6 strips away that certainty and leaves him off-kilter just as the story moves deeper into 1987. The unanswered question now is not whether the show will keep diverging from the books, but how much damage this one night will do before the season can recover.
