A True Detective

The eighth series opens with the programme doing something it had never done before: killing off a character the audience cared about. "A True Detective" finds Susan Young — played by Louise Jameson for five years, the calm centre of Bergerac's private life — washed up on a Jersey beach after a night at a trade gala. The circumstances are wrong from the start: Susan was a strong swimmer, she was wearing an evening dress, and the pathologist's report shows she hit her head and was unconscious when she entered the water. Bergerac, just back from Gibraltar where his yacht was being repaired, believes she was murdered. Crozier, new to the job and playing it by the book, reads misadventure.

John Milne's script, directed by Richard Bramall, is a model of the series' late-period formula: a financial crime wearing the face of an accident. Susan, it emerges, had been moving into a new role at Rospers, a personnel company, and had seen something she should not have — faxes about a client named John Tatteh, and files with Jersey prefixes. Tatteh, an investigator for the African Board of Trade, has come to Jersey because he believes his government and Rospers have been committing a fraud, inventing employees and channelling their salaries through Jersey to the tune of ten million pounds. The man at the centre of it, David Russell, played by Julian Wadham with a sweating, cornered intensity, lured Susan to the docks with a note and let her fall — or pushed her, the distinction being the whole case.

The title cuts both ways. Crozier, eager to close the file as misadventure, is the false version of the true detective; Bergerac, refusing the easy answer, is the real one. The evidence accumulates slowly and honestly — the falls into the water Bergerac tests himself, the Rospers pen, the witness Skebbins who saw Susan with a man on the pier. The final proof comes from the pathologist: fingermarks showing Susan's head was banged repeatedly against the deck before she went in. Not a fall. Murder.

The episode ends the way the series' best endings do — with the case closed and nothing restored. Russell is arrested; Bergerac has lost the woman he never quite told he loved; and the eighth series has announced, in the coldest possible terms, that it is not the show it used to be. A sombre, serious opener, anchored by Jameson's final performance and Nettles' grief, and one of the most important hours the series ever made.