Benefit of the Doubt (2)

The two-parter's threads pull tight. Sylvia Carter's death resolves with terrible simplicity: she was struck by a train by accident while crossing the line with her affair partner, who concealed his part in it for fear of losing his children. The Frost impostor's identity is cracked at last — he is Larry Brewer, one of Frost's own former arrests, caught thanks to a stolen war medal traced through teenagers who place him at the scene of the assaults.

The middle of the episode belongs to Reid. Investigating Hamilton's protection racket — shopkeepers physically abused into selling illegal cigarettes — he is found nearly dead in a public toilet, and the press liaison officer and even Mullett are ready to believe he relapsed into drug use. Frost defends him ferociously, and the truth is both anticlimactic and touching: Reid slipped while arresting Brewer and cracked his head on a sink. He recovers, and his stolen war medal — the one thing he valued — is found. The bond between the two men is sealed.

The surgeon's case reaches its strangest resolution. Frost connects a discarded truck of medical waste with Helena Gibson's disappearance and retrieves her remains before they are burned. Three suspects — Jameson, who she was going to expose; Dr Retnik, whose competence she questioned after unexplained deaths on his ward; and James Ingram, father of a boy who died after surgery she oversaw — all have alibis for the day she died. The solution is a grim hospital joke: Gibson was killed days before and kept in the hospital freezer because the incinerator was malfunctioning. Retnik, convinced a conversation between Gibson and Jameson was a plot to oust him, killed her and stored the body. Frost fights him by the incinerator and wins. The unexplained deaths on the ward, it turns out, were caused by a cleaner unplugging medical equipment — a banality that ends the mystery the surgeon died for.

And Anne is not Frost's daughter. The DNA test says so, and they part amicably — another near-family dissolving into the fog. Benefit of the Doubt (2), written by David Gilman and directed by Roger Bamford, is a two-parter that gives Frost everything and nothing: the impostor jailed, the cases closed, the daughter false, and the partnership with Reid — the real prize — secured.

The two-parter's quiet triumph is the Reid partnership: two honest men, one wrongly suspected of relapse, bonded for good. The cases close; the friendship is the real prize. The cases close; the friendship is the real prize.