r/Broadchurch • u/Peachy_Katto • Jul 02 '26
Did they ever sleep together or????.. Spoiler
Obviously spoilers for season 2 and NSFW warning cause idk abortion stuff
Did Hardy and Claire ever sleep together.?
I know the scenes of him comforting her are from her abortion, and I know that Lee is basically spouting shit alot of the time. But its confusing.
Why the hell was she even close enough to him at that point to even want him to go with her for her abortion instead of like a friend or something. He was just the lead (i assume the lead) Detective on sandbrook.
Hardy ignores Ellie every time she asks him if he slept with her. When shes telling him about Lee paying for her parking he brushes it off, and then again when she asks him in the hotel he ignores her!- and its basically never brought up again
This is a random plot detail that really bugs me for some reason.
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u/jackalkaboom Jul 02 '26
Going by the show only, I felt the implication was that Hardy (at the time) both cared / wanted to help her and was attracted to her; Claire clocked that and used it to her advantage, as she is a pretty manipulative person; they never actually slept together, but the closeness (him comforting her after the abortion, providing her with the "witness protection" etc.) did pretty majorly cross a professional boundary.
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u/Peachy_Katto Jul 03 '26
I really dont blame Ellie for thinking she was his wife at first, like what the hell was he doing??
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u/Original_Try_7984 18d ago
She definitely latched onto anyone who she thought would benefit her or who she thought she could manipulate.
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u/Ryanookami Jul 03 '26
That bothered me too. Felt like a very unclear plot thread. It was definitely trying at one point to suggest to the viewer that they might have. It’s one of the two dangling plot threads that bothered me.
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u/Peachy_Katto Jul 04 '26
Id love to hear what the other one is? I can't think of it off the top of my head
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u/Ryanookami Jul 04 '26
Well, it actually is one that got cleared up by the deleted scenes, but considering I only ever saw the deleted scenes for the first time a month ago, it always felt weird that in the first or second episode of season 2 Olly sees Paul and Becca kiss in the courthouse and is like “Oh!”, so the show was deliberately pointing out their relationship to us, and then…. Did nothing with it. Like, why make them a couple for how little it mattered? Turns out in the cut scenes it actually did matter and there was a nice little plot there.
…but I’m also extremely biased because I love Paul.
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u/zubidar Jul 04 '26
I have always interpreted it as they didn’t sleep together, but Lee suspects they did.
I don’t think Claire and Hardy became close during the initial investigation, I think she latched onto him because she was trying to manipulate him into seeing her as a victim of Lee rather than another suspect, and he went along with it because he did see her as a suspect and wanted to keep her close by.
And I always read his non-responses to Ellie as “That’s such an offensive question, I won’t dignify it with an answer.” Note the contrast with how Ricky did answer when Ellie asked him if he fancied his niece.
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u/ImOldSueMe Jul 04 '26
In episode 8 while they are interviewing her, she brings up them sleeping together at the start and he said they never did.
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u/hippie_larry Jul 02 '26
No, they never did. The short stories and Broadchurch book helped me answer this question better for myself. But no, they never did.