One Man's Meat

Frost's tenant, PC Tom Haliday, is injured on duty, which means Frost inherits his police dog, Kaiser — a German shepherd with a talent for finding trouble and a nose for the truth. The two are an instant comedy act, and the episode lets the joke run: the scruffiest detective in Denton walking a police dog through crime scenes like a man who has no idea who is walking whom.

The first case is a drowned girl. Jane Owens, sixteen, homeless, is found in the Denton River, and the path of her last days is a map of the town's failures. Desperate, she had considered prostitution, then rejected her first client — a married father named Alan Deering, who beat her savagely for the rejection. Her friend Rickie, who loved her, leads Frost to Deering, hoping for justice, but admits the truth: after the assault, overwhelmed by her situation and grieving a dead friend, Jane took her own life; without Jane's testimony Frost cannot prove the beating. He releases Deering — then vows to pursue kerb-crawling charges and make sure the local papers cover it, using shame where the law fails.

The second case turns into something far darker. Warren Barber, an environmental health officer probing a local meat processing factory, vanishes; his wife Naomi pushes the police to act. A severed arm washes ashore — Barber's. Frost, sneaking into the plant at night, overhears factory owner Gerry Ryan and his accomplice Jim Scott discussing the truth: the plant exists to smuggle drugs from Amsterdam. Barber, suspicious, had broken in, been caught and killed by Scott, and his dismembered body flown out over the ocean in Scott's Cessna. Ryan, remorseful, threatens to go to the police — and Scott attacks him. Frost intervenes, takes a wound, and Kaiser does what police dogs do, subduing Scott until the cavalry arrives.

One Man's Meat, written by Michael Russell and directed by Alan Dossor, is the series' grimmest pun: the meat factory that processes drugs instead of beef, the girl processed by the system and discarded. But it is also one of its warmest hours — Frost and Kaiser, detective and dog, the most loyal partnership the show ever had.

Grim, funny and unexpectedly warm, One Man's Meat pairs the series' darkest subject with its most loyal partnership: Frost and his borrowed police dog. Grim, funny and unexpectedly warm.