A Minority of One

A series of commercial robberies is bleeding Denton dry, and Frost is handed a new CID officer to work them: DC Carl Tanner, played by Lennie James in one of his earliest television roles. Tanner is black, and his promotion is pure optics. Superintendent Mullett has made the appointment to be seen to be doing something as racial tensions rise in the town, and his only real concern when Frost finally makes an arrest is whether the culprit being black will set off riots.

The case turns on the murder of Natalie Bell, a single mother on the Eastdean Estate who worked as Frost's informant. She is found dead in her burned-out flat, and the post-mortem shows she was beaten before the blaze was set. The trail leads to Ritchie Gibbs, father of her little boy, who admits he lashed out at her over the dangerous company she kept around their child — and then torched the flat to cover his tracks. But Frost, digging into her history as an informant, uncovers something uglier: Natalie had been reporting — and inventing — crimes committed by black people, purely to wound Gibbs for his earlier physical abuse of her. Her lies were weapons in a private war, and they got her killed.

The robberies, meanwhile, trace back to a a violent white crook, Paul Aspinall, who agrees to turn informant on the ringleader to save his own skin. The resolution is neat, but the episode is not interested in neatness. It is the show's most unflinching look at race and institutional prejudice within the force: the boss who promotes a man for the headlines, the informant who trades in racial fear, and the detective who has to pick his way through all of it to find a killer.

A Minority of One, written by Christopher Russell and directed by Roger Bamford, opens the second season with an episode that feels startlingly current. Lennie James gives Tanner a quiet dignity that refuses to be a victim or a saint, and the script is careful never to let the police off the hook: Mullett's cowardice is on display long before the crime is solved. It is Frost at his most uncomfortable — a white detective in a town where the colour of a suspect matters more than the truth of a case.

As a season opener it is a deliberately uncomfortable hour, and the series is the better for it. Lennie James would go on to a career of quiet authority, and it is easy to spot the beginnings of it here. It remains one of the series' most discussed episodes, and rightly so.