Holby City review with spoilers: Chloe is attacked by evil Evan as Ric collapses

Holby City served us edge-of-your-seat drama tonight as Chloe Godard (Amy Lennox) was followed to a remote country cottage by her ex, Evil Evan (Jack Ryder). Director Steve Brett and writer Andy Bayliss didn’t set the story in a dark, spooky house. Instead there was bright sunshine – a perfect day to relax and recuperate. The cottage was light and airy, all windows and reflective surfaces. But there was a creeping feeling that at any moment Evan would appear, maybe reflected in one of those shiny surfaces, maybe glimpsed in the distance through one of those sunlit windows.

Chloe at first seemed happy and contented, but gradually she became uneasy, hearing little noises. She thought someone was in the house, and it was horribly tense waiting for something to happen. When Evan finally appeared it was almost a relief – he was only human after all – but back at Holby the battered face of his ex, Sophie (Sally Scott), reminded us of exactly how nasty he can be.

At times there were shades of The Shining, as Chloe hid behind the the bathroom door and Evan occasionally twitched as if we needed some further proof that he wasn’t quite right. There were several moments when viewers will have been shouting sensible advice at their TV screens as Chloe made the classic mistake of leaving a safe place because she thought all was quiet. If only she’d managed to grab her car keys and got in the car.

She wasn’t hanging around to be a passive victim, though, and fought back with everything she had – including a knife. Ange (Dawn Steele) got to the scene, having been alerted by Fletch via Sophie and Nicky (Belinda Owusu), but mainly by knowing her daughter’s voice well enough to realise that Evan was there when she rang her. She found Chloe in a traumatised state – and Evan with a very large knife sticking out of his chest. He tried to pull it out but Ange knew he’d bleed to death, and she couldn’t risk Chloe being responsible for his death. She felt conflicted about it, though – especially when she discovered that he’d raped her daughter.

As if all that wasn’t enough trauma, we saw Cameron (Nic Jackman) getting some bad news from his sister Charlotte, and then some army officers delivered a package to him. Presumably this is the official confirmation that Bernie really is dead.

This obviously distracted him somewhat from the task in hand, which was helping to save the life of Ric (Hugh Quarshie)’s granddaughter Darla (Naomi Katiyo) who’d started to haemorrhage following the birth of her baby. Ange was the lead surgeon in the operation but when she had to dash off to help Chloe, Cameron was left to carry on – with Ric barking instructions at him from the observation room just to make a difficult situation a bit worse. Donna (Jaye Jacobs) called Zav (Marcus Griffiths) in to help and Darla was fine – but Cameron wasn’t. ‘If you’re not careful your career’s going to be over before it’s even begun,’ Ric told him. ‘I’ll race you to the finish,’ Cameron replied. He’d wanted Ric to take a dementia test, but finally he’d had enough of Ric’s bad attitude and said he wouldn’t babysit him any more.

We’d seen Ric have a funny turn while he was at the observation window, with pain and noise in his head. At the end of the episode he went to visit his baby great-granddaughter and again felt unwell – and this time collapsed on the floor. Whatever’s wrong with him has clearly reached crisis point.

Sue Haasler is the author of the official Holby City book, which you can read about here. Her other TV books and novels are listed here

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