Inside No. 9's Literary Episodes

The ninth and fittingly final series of Inside No. 9 has started! The episodes written by - and usually starring - Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are each a new story set in a singular location, spanning an impressive breadth of genres.

I could spend an eternity analysing every clever detail of every character, line, plot, parody, subversion, and meta-instrument, that make this show so grippingly entertaining and unique. Instead I urge everyone to go and watch Inside No. 9 to experience it for themselves! The biggest spoilers ahead.

All Images from BBC's Inside No. 9

I will stick to highlighting the literary-based episodes here. The first literary themed episode most likely to come to mind, if familiar with Inside No. 9, is The Understudy (Series 1 Episode 5). It is the story of Macbeth, in which Reece Shearsmith's 'Macbeth', is an understudy for the role, desperate to perform the lead character just how Shakespeare's Macbeth envies King Duncan in the play. Expertly concocting an irony and intrigue, The Understudy is a perfect example of what the show likes to do, but how about the other literary-inspired episodes that Pemberton and Shearsmith have birthed over the years of Inside No. 9?

Merrily Merrily (Series 7, Episode 1)

Merrily Merrily tackles mythology on a pedalo! It is a story about adulthood and aging changing us and causing us to drift apart from our close friends, especially through the experience of grief and loss. The character Lawrence invites his estranged friends on a pedalo trip to remember his late wife with them. Only Lawrence spots a hooded figure whom we come to understand is the 'ferryman' like Charon from Greek mythology (Charon transports the dead across the river to the underworld).

The episode ends and we don't see what happens to the others stranded out on the water in the pedalo. Were they there at all or just figments of the grieving Lawrence's imagination? Is the ferryman there or in his head? Especially when the the line 'row, row, row your boat' is heard, leaving the audience to ponder the meaning of 'life is but a dream'. It makes sense that myths play into the story then, because if myths aren't real, why do we keep them alive? It is a bitter-sweet ending as Lawrence goes with the ferryman, presumably to be reunited with his wife or at least to finally be at peace and no longer live in the suffering of his grief.

Zanzibar (Series 4 Episode 1)

Returning to Elizabethan theatre, Zanzibar is a love-letter to Shakespearean comedy. It's written entirely in iambic pentameter too! By setting the episode in a hotel corridor, the miscommunications, misunderstandings and mishaps can easily play out. The many identical doors cause hotel guests in their 'separate' stories to intermix and overlap, entangling them into a web of confusion and hilarity.

All the favourite Shakespearean tropes appear and tie into a connecting string of events - from servant plotting, baby swapping, love spells, potions and euphemistic gags! Yet, Zanzibar is organised chaos that is meticulously thought out to achieve a very funny and satisfying story for everyone, whether you're a classical theatre lover or not.

Wuthering Heist (Series 6 Episode 1)

In a similar vein to The Understudy and Zanzibar, the show plays on historical theatre in Wuthering Heist. It leans heavily into the comedic rather than the tragic: complete with over the top characters dishing out rhyming couplets, jokes, and pantomime moments. The masked archetypes (a harlequin, a wealthy man, the lovers, etc.) of a 'Commedia dell’arte' (a form of Italian Renaissance comedy) take part in a heist equipped with all the visuals and familiarities of a classic heist film - It is not as Emily Bronte as the title would suggest.

However five series later, Shearsmith and Pemberton acknowledge how some may come to expect their subversions of classic tropes. A fourth-wall breaking monologue opens the episode by stating that the premise of a Commedia dell’arte heist 'is quite clever in a way, but still sounds like something a drama teacher would have a wank to - hey, it’s series 6, you’ve got to allow for a certain artistic exhaustion.' Pre-empting the potential critique of the episode by harbouring it into the sarcastic tone of the piece already sets Wuthering Heist apart from previous Inside No. 9 stories. It dims any presence of 'artistic exhaustion' that their might've been and maintains the flare of originality that the episode needs.

Nine Lives Kat (Series 7 Episode 3)

Parodying the mystery and detective crime genre, an especially popular form of thriller for lovers of modern novels and British TV drama, Pemberton and Shearsmith critique the formulaic and unoriginal writing that has grown with the genre's popularity in Nine Lives Kat.

Kat (Katrina) seems to be the generic detective with a hardened attitude investigating a case that parrallels her own tragic backstory, until Ezra, Kat's friend, is revealed to be the writer of Kat's story. Kat is a fictional character made up of cliché detective tropes that Ezra struggles to flesh out any further. He keeps notes of her in the bottom of a drawer and has given up trying to finish her story. (I'm going to guess Katrina as a name is a reference to Katrina from Taming of the Shrew, a character in a play-within-a-play, surely it's no coincidence!)

Then there is a twist-within-a-twist. Whilst Kat, come to life, terrorises her creator until he agrees to finish writing her, we find that Ezra isn't real either and they are both fictional characters written by a woman named Matilda.

Matilda, sick of the predictable and lazy writing of detective stories wanted to rectify this by using a meta-twist in her book. Yet even she, original though her idea might be, struggles to tie up Ezra's ending and puts him in her bottom drawer.

Nine Lives Kat is a commentary on the relationship between creator and story and the conflict that can manifest between them when trying to be original. The episode shows how this pressure can counteractively breed unproductive resentment. You could say there is a third inception-like twist: Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are the real-world writers of all the characters including Matilda. Perhaps Nine Lives Kat explores their own experiences as writers - experiences of striving to avoid basic and derivative writing whilst at the same maintaining the love and inspiration necessary to make and finish creative stories.