A Face in the Crowd

Not taking unemployment well is putting it mildly. Naylor and Clark, both of them unused to sitting still, reluctantly take a missing persons job from Deakin, and the reluctance is part of the point: they need the work, and Deakin knows it. But the case pulls Connell in as well, and she risks her own career in the Met to dig up information on the prospective employees at the heart of the mystery.

J. C. Wilsher and Julian Jones wrote it, Richard Standeven directed, and what starts as a simple search thickens quickly. DCI Lawson, DI Simon Eaton and DC Nigel Sharpe each contribute a strand, and the truth behind the disappearance turns out to be rooted in something more complicated than circumstance. The ranks get their actors' names too: Colum Convey is DI Eaton, Niall Refoy is DC Sharpe, and Christopher Hunter's DCI Lawson gives the case its institutional frame. Barbara Wilshere's Kate Roberts is in the background again, one of the series' quiet constants.

The casting has a name that jumps out now. Mark Strong, long before Kingsman and a dozen film franchises, plays David Lacey, with Daniel Ryan as Michael Lacey. Even in the early nineties he carried that particular stillness, the sense of a man holding something back, which is exactly what the part needs.

The real draw is watching the old team work outside their element. No badges, no warrant cards, just wits and nerve, with Connell operating from inside a force that may not want her there much longer. It's a missing persons case with the flavour of something darker, and the episode knows the two are connected. Nothing about this season's arrangement is comfortable, and that's the point. The missing person at the centre stays off screen for much of the hour, which is a neat way to keep the mystery alive, and the investigation has the patient, peeling quality the show does so well. Each interview removes a layer, and the truth underneath is not what anyone ordered.