Release

The second series of Band of Gold ends with its most damaged character destroying herself. In Release, Colette tries to make Tracy understand what she has done, but Tracy seems to be living in another world, and Colette has no choice but to tell Rose. The synopsis promised a climax both unexpected and shocking, and it delivers both.

The truth is that Tracy killed all three men. Curly called at Carol's house while Carol was out with Emma in the park, and Tracy cut his throat. She killed George Ferguson in a car park in the same way. Then she killed Dez. Anita, who had her own reasons to hate Ferguson and was briefly a suspect, works out that the murderer is the teenage girl the women have spent two series trying to protect.

Tracy does not wait to be caught. She goes home to her parents in Harrogate and confronts her father, who admits that he abused her. When Rose telephones, Tracy hears her voice and unplugs the phone. Rose borrows a van and the women drive to Harrogate, but they arrive too late. Tracy has stabbed herself in her old bedroom, and the scene ends with Rose holding her body while Colette and Tracy's father stand in the doorway.

The final scenes return to the pub where the first series began. It is the day of Tracy's funeral, and Rose, Carol, Anita, Joyce and Colette raise their glasses to her. Carol has just learned that Curly left her his factory and his money, so the series ends with a fortune arriving at the moment of greatest loss.

Samantha Morton's Tracy is the reason the ending hurts. Over two series she has been a runaway, an addict, a victim of her father and her pimp, and finally a killer, and the drama never asks the audience to stop caring about her. The confrontation with her father makes the connection explicit without offering it as an excuse.

The weakness is the mechanics of the solution. A drugged teenager carrying out three throat-cutting murders strains belief, and Television Heaven described the second series as implausible in places. Kay Mellor plainly chose emotional truth over procedural logic.

As a conclusion to the story of the original four women it is devastating and fitting. The third series, retitled Gold, would keep only a few characters, among them Rose, Carol and Colette, and change the show's nature entirely. Matthew Evans directs.