Emmerdale producer Sophie Roper has defended the decision to kill off Dr Caitlin Todd (Caroline Harker), one of the village's most grotesque characters, as the soap faces scrutiny over how it handles abusers.
Todd emerged as a vicious and vindictive doctor assigned to mentor Jacob Gallagher (Joe-Warren Plant), systematically breaking his spirit with cruel manipulations. She then preyed upon Charity Dingle (Emma Atkins) with a heinous blackmail scheme, which gave way to rape, assaulting Charity when she was in a vulnerable state.
As Charity suffered gravely in the aftermath, she discovered she wasn't Todd's only victim; Todd had previously raped a nurse at her last hospital. Despite Charity reporting the crime to the police, the CPS were unwilling to press charges, and with her other victim unwilling to report her own ordeal, it looked as though Todd would face no justice.
Sarah's fatal push
Enter Sarah Sugden (Katie Hill). Entering Jacob's Fold to find her grandma, Charity, lambasting an increasingly less-smug Todd, she grabbed the doctor fiercely, determined to hand her over to the police, but unhanded her when Charity told her that the police wouldn't charge her. Fury bubbling to the surface, Sarah shoved Todd, who tripped and smashed her head into a table, before crumbling to the floor, dead.
Emmerdale has, at times, come under scrutiny for killing its abusers rather than having them face legal justice. Celia Daniels (Jaye Griffiths), the lynchpin behind an enormous drug and people trafficking, prostitution and modern slavery ring, and her lieutenant son, Ray Walters (Joe Absolom), also faced grisly deaths rather than prison.
Anthony Fox (Nicholas Day), who'd historically raped his daughter, Ruby (Beth Cordingly), wound up murdered, while Lydia Dingle's (Karen Blick) rapist, Craig Reed (Ben Addis), was killed by a horse.
Producer's defence
Sophie Roper recently spoke on the 'type' of justice Todd received, telling Metro: 'It opens up that debate as well, but that's something we'll look at and explore through the course of the story.'
'Ultimately, through soap, we will always try to find that; to find those consequences, those things that you might lose as a result of doing something 'wrong', as the soap gods would call it.'
Describing the story as 'one that is driven by truth and emotion,' she went on to say: 'I think it's grounded in family and life and everything that Sarah has to face. But absolutely, there will be some legal consequences to this as we go through that will take on lots of different twists and turns.'
'I think as you watch and you see the story unfold, we do skew expectations. There will be unexpected developments in this story that hopefully keep it engaging and exciting as we go through.'
Truthful to justice
Sophie went on to talk about whether or not Todd was always going to die: 'I think any story like this, when we start on it, stories evolve all the time as we go through that process, and when we embark on anything like this, which of course is such a sensitive subject matter and a difficult subject matter to go through, we were really keen to dramatise the pursuit of justice, and that formulates so much of the first part of Charity's journey.'
Sophie went on to highlight how important it was to see Charity report the rape. 'We were very keen to see that she went to the police, that she absolutely reported what had happened, and that we saw that she was believed and that a police investigation took place as a result of that, because we know that unfortunately for so many survivors, they don't feel like they can report this type of assault.'
'But the difficult reality is that this type of crime can be really difficult to prove and prosecute; we wanted to be truthful to that. It isn't everybody's experience, but unfortunately, for a lot of people, justice from a criminal standpoint doesn't happen.'
