Damaged

Damaged turns from the killer to the damage he leaves behind. Steve, Gina's estranged husband, is taken in for questioning about her murder, and when he is released he does not grieve quietly. He blames Carol for leading his wife into prostitution, and he goes looking for the women Gina knew, trying to understand the life she had been leading behind his back.

Ray Stevenson's Steve is an awkward figure for the drama. He is the violent husband Gina threw out, and his anger at Carol is partly a refusal to see his own part in her desperation. Yet his need to know what happened to her is real. Kay Mellor lets both truths stand. Rachel Davies, as Gina's mother Joyce, carries the practical burden: three grandchildren and a daughter who led a life her family knew nothing about.

The other half of the episode belongs to Tracy. After the attack by her pimp Dez she is in hospital, and at her bedside Rose meets Tracy's mother. The meeting opens the door to Tracy's family, and to the reason she ran away. Later in the series it emerges that her father abused her and that she cannot be sure her mother believes her. Rose has seen girls like Tracy before and refuses to give up on this one.

Then another woman is murdered. The second killing confirms that Gina's death was not personal, and the fear on the Lane becomes general. The women carry on working because they have to, and their safety depends more on one another than on any faith in the police.

The weakness is structural. A second victim is the obvious way to raise the stakes, and the episode follows the conventions of a serial-killer story more closely than the first two. Its strength is in refusing to let the victims become numbers. Gina's family, Tracy's mother and the women still working the Lane give each death a human cost.

Kay Mellor wrote every episode of the first two series. She later said that some critics had found the drama anti-male, and replied that it was about women whose lives were controlled by men, a description that fits this episode's gallery of husbands, pimps and clients.

Richard Laxton takes over as director for this and the following episode. The series was filmed in Bradford, with some scenes shot in Ashton-under-Lyne, and the real Lumb Lane in Manningham is the model for the street the women call the Lane.