Not with Kindness

Two cases, one short-staffed station, and a new partner watching Frost's methods with growing alarm. An illness has swept through Denton's ranks, so DS Sandy Gilmore is drafted in as a temporary partner just as Frost's late wife's overbearing sister arrives to make his home life as difficult as possible. The domestic subplot is a light counterpoint; the investigations are anything but.

Fifteen-year-old Paula Bartlett vanished from her paper round, and the post-mortem shows she had sex shortly before she died. Suspicion drifts between her mother's boyfriend Colin and a customer, Mike Bell, who once drove her to school. When a bracelet charm belonging to Paula turns up in Bell's car, he breaks down and confesses: Paula came to his house following a quarrel at home; they slept together, she threatened to accuse him of assault; he strangled her in a panic to keep her quiet. It is a grim, believable story — until Gilmore notices, quietly, that every one of Paula's charms had already been accounted for. Frost planted the trinket to force the confession, and his new partner has caught him at it. Nobody disciplines him; the confession stands.

The second case belongs to Alex Compton, who reports a stalker and a stream of threatening phone calls. When her husband dies in an arson attack, Frost's sympathy slowly curdles. A little trickery and Alex admits the truth: the stalker was her own invention, and she killed her husband to collect on his life insurance after discovering his affair. The title is a sour joke about both stories — the kindness Frost appears to offer his suspects is never quite what it looks like.

Written by Richard Harris from Wingfield's Night Frost and directed by David Reynolds, Not with Kindness is the episode in which the series finds its moral footing. The planted evidence is treated without hand-wringing, as a practical cruelty in service of a larger justice, and the show makes its first suggestion that Denton's most effective detective is also its least scrupulous. Tony Haygarth's Gilmore — the partner who sees exactly what his guv'nor is up to — supplies the conscience, and the episode's uncomfortable question: when the ends justify the means, who draws the line?

The episode also marks the moment the show stopped pretending Frost was simply an eccentric. The charm trick, played without guilt, is the first sign of a detective who treats evidence as a means to an end — and the series would spend the next two decades asking whether that was a strength or a flaw.

The episode also marks the moment the show stopped pretending Frost was simply an eccentric. The charm trick, played without guilt, is the first sign of a detective who treats evidence as a means to an end — and the series would spend the next two decades asking whether that was a strength or a flaw.