Before we begin, I feel I need to confess just how much I pored over the first season Big Little Lies. I watched it, then re-watched it. Unable to let it go, I read the book. I encouraged my friends to read the book. I then sat on a multi-way Skype call and read aloud from the “discussion questions” at the back.

Glasses perched on my nose, peering into a webcam, I quoted the things like: “Jane remembers, ‘she hadn’t told anyone. She’d swallowed it whole and pretended it meant nothing, and therefore it had come to mean everything.’ Do you think it’s a universal truth that the more you keep something secret, the more power it takes on?” My friends didn’t just indulge me in this, they were as into it as I was, and that, reader, says something about what Big Little Lies did to women.

Last season’s finale left us with the murder we’d been promised from episode one. Perry (Alexander Skarsgård) - Celeste’s (Nicole Kidman) husband - is killed at a rather ridiculous gala at Otter Bay Public School, where the women are dressed as Audrey Hepburn and the men as Elvis. Perry is wearing high-collared, v-neck shirt and stuck on sideburns when he is pushed down the stairs by Bonnie (who we learn has a history of domestic violence and was, to put it mildly, triggered by him lurching at Celeste – the wife he’s been abusing).

Big Little Lies season 2: what we thought of the first episode