Sins of the Fathers

"Sins of the Fathers" is the fourth series at its most ambitious — a story about a film about the occupation, told against the island's real wartime history. A low-budget Second World War movie is being shot on Jersey, with Henry Hoffman — a German actor with gambling debts, played with a fine, fraying hauteur by Michael Jayston — playing a Nazi officer. He has received threatening letters ordering him off the island. His assistant Joan is taking blows he claims came from a backer. And a rope meant for his stunt breaks, injuring another man. Bergerac is handed a case that keeps looking like an accident and keeps turning into something else.

Tessa Coleman's script, directed by Graeme Harper — later a Doctor Who director — weaves the present-day murder plot into the island's memory of the occupation. Hoffman's father Gunter was stationed in Jersey during the war and was executed by firing squad, accused of raping a local girl. The girl, Elizabeth Lasseur, still lives locally, married to a retired quarry master; the page recording Gunter's fate has been removed from the records; and the film's execution scene is being staged within sight of the real history.

The conspiracy, when it unspools, is a beaut. Hoffman faked his own death — the boat he was on was blown up, with the backer Robert Mancini aboard — so that his life insurance, for which Joan is the beneficiary, would pay out. The ring found on the body belonged to Mancini, won off him in a coin toss, and its presence is what unravels the scheme: Joan, seeing it, feared Hoffman really was dead and went looking for him. The final twist is the film's own premise: Gunter did not rape Elizabeth. She loved him, and he was her daughter's father — the secret that explains the removed records, the threats and the graves.

The episode ends at a neglected grave, with Annette — the reporter, the Fouchets' granddaughter — tending it, and Bergerac offering to discuss her champagne bill. It is a rare hour in which the crime is almost incidental to the history underneath, and it shows the fourth series at its most serious. A grave, intelligent story about the sins the fathers commit and the children who pay for them.