Amid an unending heatwave in contemporary Wales – and increasingly violent weather around the world – a psychological thriller unfolds.

Two years after an accident that killed her husband and paralysed her from the waist down, Gabrielle Fox returns to work as a psychologist at an adolescent internment unit. One patient, 16-year-old Bethany, is accused of murdering her mother by stabbing her several times with a screwdriver.

This is the premise of the BBC TV adaptation of Liz Jensen’s 2009 novel, The Rapture. While slightly predictable, its narrative highlights the motivations that drive people towards climate action, including a sense of responsibility and desire for justice.

Bethany (played by India Amarteifio) denies any involvement in the murder, although she was found at the crime scene covered in blood. A week before the death, she had drawn a gruesome vision of her mother’s face with a screwdriver stabbing her eye. Fox (Ruth Madeley) is given the task of helping her patient accept responsibility for allegedly murdering her mother.

Bethany’s parents are the founders of a successful spiritual movement, the Faith Way. Its “Choose Hope” slogan is widely used on social media to undermine the denunciation of climate catastrophe by activists from the Climate Front – an eco-activist organisation that protests about the extraction of fossil fuel extraction, both on the streets and in the courts.

Views of former industrial sites, long beaches at low tide, giant electricity pylons........

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