The Catch – Part 2

The second half of The Catch is about what happens after a woman with no power reports a man with plenty. Sherrie, raped by the magistrate Ed Smithson, tells Rose what happened. The police become involved. Then Sherrie withdraws her statement.

The reason is money. Smithson has bribed her, and for a young sex worker with few resources and every reason to doubt that a court would believe her, the offer is hard to refuse. The episode does not condemn Sherrie for taking it. It shows a system in which the victim's best option might be to accept a payment from her attacker, and that is its sharpest observation.

Rose will not let it rest. She accuses Smithson of blackmailing and bribing Sherrie, and the accusation costs her the job she took on at the start of Gold. The woman who chose to work inside the system is thrown out of it for refusing to protect one of its respectable members.

The outcome is partly a vindication. Inspector Henryson, played by Kern Falconer, gives Rose her job back and removes Smithson as the sponsor of the scheme. Rose has been proved right, and the man who abused his position has lost it. Whether he faces anything more, the sources available here do not say.

Mark Davies Markham's story gives Geraldine James's Rose the kind of moral fight that suits her, and it uses the community-liaison premise of Gold more effectively than any other episode. Rose is useful precisely because she knows the women's world and will not take the official version on trust.

The weakness is the neatness of the ending. Rose's reinstatement and Smithson's removal resolve the institutional story tidily, while Sherrie's own outcome is left vague. A series that had once ended with a teenage girl's suicide now settles for a satisfying office victory.

The strength is the depiction of the retraction, which captures something real about why such cases collapse. The episode understands that silence can be bought, and that the people most able to buy it are the ones a community trusts.

Darryl Clark plays PC Simons, and Daniel Edwards returns as Sherrie for the story's conclusion.

Fiona Allen appears as DI Cooper, and David Innes Edwards directs. The story also clears the way for the final two-parter, in which Rose's position with the police and her loyalty to the women are tested again by a more dangerous threat.