There’s a good old proverb that goes like, “Love your neighbor, yet pull not down your hedge.” But the people of a fictional posh neighborhood in the latest Channel 5 show, The Feud, don’t abide by this. When people of the usually cheerful community of Shelbury Drive start turning against each other, the possibility of digging up others’ dirt and doing vile things is always on the cards. When a solicitor living in this neighborhood changes her plan of moving out and chooses to build an extension to their house, her neighbors get involved in her life in a way nobody could have imagined.
Spoilers Ahead
What happens in the show?
Emma and John plan to move out of their neighborhood, but Emma changes her mind and builds an extended kitchen in their house instead. John has been unemployed for a while and isn’t happy about Emma making the decision to stay back and build more. Emma, being the financially stable one, is adamant about staying and improving their house. Their neighbors and friends Sonia and Alan are the closest to them, and they support the extension Emma is planning. However, an old couple who share a common wall with Emma and John aren’t thrilled about the extension. Their teenage son, Marcus, disappeared years ago, and they have a tree adjacent to the said wall, which they’re very sentimental about. There’s also a neighbor called Nick, who works for a security company, and often complains about people parking on the street. He has started a petition to make sure that people aren’t allowed to park outside their driveways, and he also has a CCTV camera in front of the house that overlooks three of his neighbour’s houses: Emma and John’s, Alan and Sonia’s, and the old couple Barbara and Derek’s. The show revolves around these people and their involvement with Emma’s plan of extending her kitchen.
How does Emma get approval from the planning and building control?
After dealing with a husband who’s against the project, Emma also gets into a spat with Derek and Barbara over the same issue. The old couple thinks that the new structure would block light from reaching their garden, and there’s also a possibility they’d have to uproot their special tree and move the fence. There’s a rumor flying around the neighborhood that the missing son is buried under that tree, but there’s no reason to believe the rumor. So Emma has a hard time procuring her neighbor’s consent as well as approval from the planning and building control. A builder named Lee answers Emma’s advertisement, and from the moment he appears, you sense something is off with the guy. She decides to visit her father, Terry, to help her get that approval. Now Terry is a notorious man who had previously taken money from Emma and John just to lose it all. John doesn’t see eye to eye with the man, and Emma meets Terry in secrecy. Terry manages to get her the letter of approval, but Emma knows her father will soon demand something in return. However, for the time being, Emma gets the win, much to Barbara and Derek’s disappointment.
Was John cheating on Emma?
We see John behaving weirdly from the first minute of the show, and it’s not a surprise that he and Emma have zero chemistry. Even when we see Emma trying to be the bigger person, John acts like a brat who has clearly been feeling emasculated for a long time. We first get a hint of John sneaking around behind Emma’s back through CCTV footage Nick posts on the group chat. This group chat consists of some of the people of Shelbury Drive. Nick complains about the van Emma’s builder, Lee, had parked in the street for a long time. But when Emma checks the video, she sees Alan and Sonia’s bedroom, where Sonia is closing the curtains while John is sitting on their bed and being all cutesy. Even when the four of them hang out together, Sonia knows things about John she’s not supposed to, and we also see Alan calling John out for exaggerating his ‘fun’ stories. Nick can’t sleep because of the noise of the construction, and he also notices Sonia walking out of Emma’s house while John and her body language clearly suggest a sexual tension between them. When Emma tries to talk to Sonia about the importance of truth between women, Sonia, being the classic side chick, replies, What else have we got? But even before we see John and Sonia doing anything physical, the evidence is more than enough to prove that they’re having an affair.
How does Beth fall into the trap of Gallagher?
Emma defended a Bangladeshi boy in court and proved that the arresting officer was racist. The arresting officer was Gallagher, a woman who claimed that the accused knew English, but Emma proved that he didn’t. Gallagher gets suspended from duty and makes it her mission to take revenge on Emma. She creates a fake Instagram account to befriend Beth, Emma’s teenage daughter who’s into photography. Gallagher doesn’t use her real name or pictures on the profile, and she appears on Beth’s screen as Andi. Gallagher plays the long game, and she seduces Beth gradually, just to punch her down to rock bottom. She clicks cozy pictures of John and Sonia hanging out in a coffee shop and then uses those pictures in a so-called exhibition just to shock Beth. Beth is pretty shaken up after watching her father kiss her neighbor, and just when she hesitantly tells Terry about it, Gallagher soon tracks her down and kidnaps her. She handcuffs Beth to an oven door at her place and uses her phone to send the same pictures to Emma.
What happens after Sonia gets pregnant?
After months of seeing each other in secrecy, Sonia and John finally hit a bad patch when Terry surprises John in the coffee shop where he is waiting for Sonia. As soon as Sonia walks through the door, she chooses to turn around and skedaddle, seeing John with another man. But Terry is an observant old dude, and he notices something is up. He tells Emma about it later, but Emma is mad at him for pressuring her to sign the documents. However, this incident puts the fear of God in John, and he decides to tell Sonia that they should stop their little affair. Sonia was about to tell John she was pregnant but chooses not to tell him now that they’re breaking up. Back at their house, Alan tries to check Sonia’s phone; he has been suspicious of Sonia for quite a long time, as he also tried to tell Emma about it. After failing to guess the password, he comes across the pregnancy test in her bag. Instead of confronting Sonia about it, Alan decides to have a little bit of fun himself. He goes to see John and tells him about the pregnancy. Alan pretends to be elated that he got Sonia pregnant even though they’re rarely intimate with each other, and he gets under John’s skin just by breaking this news to him. John then goes to see Sonia, and now he wants to start a new family with her. You could always tell that John was crooked, but to abandon his wife and daughter just to continue an affair seems low even for him.
Does John Accidentally Kill Derek?
Derek never really let Emma and John be at peace ever since they started the construction. Someone was threatening Emma by sending her dead magpies along with little catchphrases and pictures of her and her family throughout the series, and she couldn’t help but think that Derek was behind it. After a point, Derek got so unreasonable that he wouldn’t open the door to have a chat with Emma. Derek also blasts jazz at maximum volume to mess with them, even if that means torturing his wife. We see Derek abusing Barbara for a long time, and he also blames her for their son’s disappearance. When Emma’s patience runs out, she grabs a shovel and approaches their house to uproot their special tree. Derek knocks Barbara out when Emma comes knocking, and he also tries to get hands-on with Emma to try and stop her. John follows Emma to see everything unfold, and he pushes Derek to the floor to free Emma, but Derek soon lies in a pool of blood. John panics and doesn’t report the incident to the police, and he also prevents Emma, a woman of the law, from doing so. But the next day, when Emma visits Barbara, she seems relieved and kind of happy that Derek is in the hospital. She offers Emma a cup of tea, refuses to talk about Derek much, and asks her to leave soon.
Who killed Alan?
The incident with Derek and Alan and Emma’s growing suspicion couldn’t come at a worse time for John; good thing he doesn’t have a job. So instead of handling the chaos, John tries to take the easy way out and elope with Sonia. In the other house, Alan finally confronts Sonia about her infidelity. Alan couldn’t forgive her for what she did to him, not that he didn’t want to. He’d hoped that after John and Emma moved, things would be better, but they didn’t, and started building onto the house instead. Alan hired Lee to make sure that the construction went wrong, and his plan was to bankrupt Emma.
The affair affected Alan in the wrong way, seeing the guy he calls his friend sleep with his wife and watching both of them pretend that everything was normal. He crushes Sonia in the confrontation, and he’s almost psychotic after losing the love of his life like this. Alan then goes to confront John, and a few moments later, Emma comes back to their house to find Alan dead in the kitchen with a knife in his chest.
In The Feud’s ending, When John returns after days in hiding, Emma tells him that the police are looking for him. Nick has seen John returning, and we assume that he informs the cops, who take John into custody. But neither Emma nor Sonia want to believe that John was the murderer, and understandably so. John was a scared and nervous man, and it couldn’t be that easy a job to murder Alan. When Emma asks Nick to check his CCTV footage, Nick tells her that the police have already been through it and found no evidence, since the camera was covered with a cloth at the time of the murder. But Emma doesn’t lose hope, and she goes to Nick’s once again to check the footage. While he’s not in the room, Emma finds all things ornithology in his room, along with sketches of magpies. It didn’t take her long to see that it was Nick himself who disabled the camera, as his reflection was caught on the window of a car while he was doing so. Emma found the dead magpies in Alan’s garden just moments ago, and Nick, being the huge bird lover he is, knew all along that Alan was the one killing the magpies and threatening Emma. When he saw Alan following John into the house, he took his chance to disable the camera, break into their house through the garden door, and kill Alan. Sonia also revealed to Emma that Lee, the builder, was present at the scene. Lee wanted to help Alan scare John, but when he arrived, Alan was already dead. Emma gets Nick arrested, and Gallagher also returns Beth, pretending she was found and not kidnapped. When Emma tells Beth that she’ll make sure Gallagher is punished, Beth doesn’t let her mom go after her, as she’s realized it won’t do anyone any good. The show ends with Barbara thanking Emma for whatever happened the day Derek fell, as he has died and she’s free. Barbara also gets another reward, as her son Marcus is now all grown up, and he buys a house on the same street to live closer to his mother. So what started with Emma just wanting to have a nice kitchen ended in a way nobody would ever have predicted.
