Love

Love is the episode in which the second series reveals its design. Two secrets come out, one about Rose's family and one about Tracy, and both turn the story in directions that cannot be undone.

The first concerns Rose's daughter. After the false trail in Manchester, Rose discovers that the girl she gave up is in Sheffield and, as the synopsis puts it, to her horror, working as a prostitute. The daughter is Colette, the damaged young woman whom Rose has disliked and distrusted since she first appeared alongside Tracy. Colette was the foster child Hannah, who attacked Sarah and ran away. The person Rose has been pushing out of her house is the person she has been searching for.

It is a melodramatic revelation, and Television Heaven's review of the series found Colette underdeveloped as a character, which weakens it. Yet the idea is a strong one. Rose's maternal care for Tracy has been one of the series' constants; finding her own daughter in the same life, and finding her hostile, is a bitter reversal.

The second secret is worse. Dez, the pimp who almost killed Tracy in the first series, is released from prison. Tracy takes him home and sleeps with him. Then, with Colette's help, she takes her revenge, and Colette discovers that Tracy means to kill him. Tracy murders Dez. The girl the series has treated as a victim, drugged, abused and beaten, is now capable of killing in cold blood.

That turn reframes the earlier murders, though the episode does not say so outright. The audience is left to wonder how far Tracy's psychosis, worsened by Alf Black's drugs, has already taken her. Samantha Morton's Tracy is the centre of the series, and her decline is its tragedy.

The strength of the episode is the way it ties both revelations to the series' argument about damaged children. Colette ran from a foster home; Tracy ran from an abusive father. Both ended on the street, and both have been shaped by violence they did not choose.

The weakness is plausibility. Rose's daughter turning out to be the woman already living in her house asks a lot of coincidence, and the momentum towards Tracy's crimes leaves less room for the quieter observation that made the first series distinctive. Matthew Evans directs. The episode ends with Dez dead and Colette holding a secret that she cannot keep for long.