Conclusions

The first season closes with three cases packed into one episode and a new partner for Frost: DC Webster, a Scottish secondment who cannot settle into Denton, and who is hiding the episode's darkest secret from the first frame.

Two of the cases are linked. A private casino is robbed; an elderly man is killed in a hit-and-run. The dead man, Roger Massie, turns out to be the the child of a local politician; the car that struck him belonged to his own family. Massie owed the casino a fortune; the robbery was his way of wiping the slate, and he had his girlfriend drive the car erratically to manufacture an alibi. Frost nabs him regardless of the weight his mother's money and influence throw behind the defence, and the episode lets the class resentments — the family's lawyers, the town's quiet fury — sit openly in the frame.

The third case is the one that matters. PC Dave Shelby, a young officer, is shot dead; the hunt corners a fleeing robber, Ronnie Eustace, and Frost nearly talks him down before Webster, watching from a sniper position, shoots him. The ballistics say otherwise: Shelby was killed with two different guns. Webster had murdered him with his own service revolver and then staged a shotgun to frame Eustace — a corrupt officer erasing a colleague who knew too much, and silencing the one witness to his own crime. Vincent Regan's Shelby is drawn just enough to make the betrayal sting: a man of affairs and harassment allegations, killed by the institution he served.

Conclusions, written by Richard Harris and directed by Anthony Simmons, plants the corruption theme that will shadow the whole series. Frost, who bends rules constantly, comes face to face with a man who snapped them fatally, and the episode refuses to pretend the two are easy to distinguish. George Anton's Webster, watchful and cold, is the season's most disturbing figure — and the image of Frost watching a colleague use a sniper's scope to silence a problem marks the moment the show stops being comfortable.

As a season closer it is a bold statement of intent: the show's first season had been warm and wry, and it ended by looking squarely at a man who used his authority to kill. The corruption thread would return again and again, and Webster's cold, watchful face is where it begins.

As a season closer it is a bold statement of intent: the show's first season had been warm and wry, and it ended by looking squarely at a man who used his authority to kill. The corruption thread would return again and again, and Webster's cold, watchful face is where it begins.