top picture: susan wright to maggie radcliffe, s01e04 second picture: family photo, s01e07 2-frame sequence: susan in witness box after denying making threat to maggie, s0e05 final 6 frames: susan under interrogation (abridged), s01e07
susan wright is so enigmatic (& pauline quirke wonderful at portraying her contradictions). in just one sentence susan makes arguably the most spine-chilling threat of the entire show - “i know men who would rape you” - then under interrogation gives one of the show’s most devastating monologues. (the first and only time she’ll show such vulnerability.) she loves her dog & waits years to find her son, but leaves danny’s body in the surf. how could someone whose daughters were raped, so cavalierly threaten another woman with the same? (even if she had no intention of following through.)
who knows if susan was always this surly, but seeing her beaming in that old family photo (think she’s second from the left?), i’d theorize much of her coldness is a defensive tactic, direct result of what’s happened to her. i didn’t have space for the maaany screencaps of susan essentially saying “fuck the police”, but after her husband’s suicide, the media & the law are all that's left for her to take out her anger on. see how she tells ellie in the interrogation sequence above, “You people [the police] destroyed my family” (instead of her husband). journalists, police and child services twisted her words against her, called her a bad mother and took her remaining children away, so why should she respect or call them when she finds danny’s body? she sees maggie as emblematic of all media, who never understood her pain, so has no problem threatening her by invoking the exact sort of monster her husband was. and she’ll deny her threat in court because even if maggie isn’t lying, journalists lie, and susan won’t give them the satisfaction. [[edit: also explains why when susan meets ellie again at the trial, instead of sympathizing w/ their shared experience, she throws ellie’s doubt back in her face. “you must have known - we all know”]]
focusing on these enemies also allows her to push further from the spectre of her husband, and the personal guilt of not knowing or doing anything to stop him. (something ellie will also encounter - the show isn’t subtle about that parallel.) not many people would first describe a child’s corpse as “beautiful”, “peaceful”, but susan is used to distancing from death; what affects her most is how danny looks, because she’s haunted by what she didn’t see. (also remember, susan found out much later & never saw her daughter’s body.) in interrogation, susan says her older daughter “got herself killed” by standing up to the father; of course susan’s not actually blaming her daughter, but she can’t bring herself to vocalize the depths of her own failure. she creates tiny bits of emotional distance by referring to her children as if they hold no relation to her: the daughters are “the oldest” and “the young one”; “her sister was having none of it” and “wanted to protect her little baby sister”; later social services takes “the baby”. only when susan is brought to tears does she abandon these separations (here’s the whole quote): “When I was...looking at that boy’s body, I kept wondering if my girl looked that peaceful after he killed her.” wanting danny’s body, left untouched, to be evidence her daughter might have died without pain.
but then again, pauline quirke instantly injects anger into her tears with that haunting “i don’t think she did”.