Full Moon Fever

One bad night shift, and suddenly everyone's private life is public property. The team spend the night covering for each other, and the police ombudsman takes an interest. But the ombudsman is just the official version of what's already happening inside the station: the reckoning arrives with paperwork either way. The title borrows the old superstition about full moons and busy nights, and this shift lives up to it. For a show that usually lets trouble arrive gradually, the episode starts everything with a single shift and never lets up.

Helen McNally is the one who finds the scandal. Joanne Crawford gets the thankless job of uncovering something rotten inside the department, and she does it with the grim satisfaction of someone who suspected it all along. Meanwhile Grace is coming apart at home, doubting the career she fought to get. Two kinds of collapse in one station, neither of them covered by the uniform. Grace's crisis is the quieter disaster, and it's the one the episode leaves you with.

Fran Harris wrote it, Gilles Bannier directed, and it aired in April 2023, the fourth of the first series' six episodes. The core trio of Siân Brooke, Katherine Devlin and Nathan Braniff keep their footing while the walls close in, and Jonathan Harden's Jonty Johnson and the rest of the brass do what brass does in a crisis: look after themselves first. The night shift sequences have the right kind of chaos, the one where everyone is moving and nobody is in charge yet. The fallout is swift, and the episode doesn't bother pretending the institution will take the hit for its people.

The episode isn't really about who made the mistake. It's about how fast a mistake becomes a file, and what a file does to a life. Grace's doubt is the honest part of the whole hour, and it lingers longer than the inquiry. What the ombudsman concludes matters less than what Grace is already concluding about herself.