This Too Shall Pass

A year in, and the job has stopped being new. That's when it gets dangerous. The second series opens with a drug-fuelled crime wave that pulls the team into a loyalist estate, the kind of place where the uniform is only part of what you're walking into, and the episode wastes no time getting them there. The title is the kind of reassurance you need when you're in the middle of it, which is exactly where the episode puts everyone.

The trouble turns violent, and the violence does what violence always does in this show: it finds the fault lines in the relationships that hold the station together. The one that matters here is Stevie Neil and Grace Ellis. They've built a working partnership over the year, and the clash puts it at risk in a way no amount of paperwork can smooth over. But the job doesn't stop, so they have to keep working together anyway. That's the human cost, itemised in two people who can't afford to fall out, because the estate won't wait for them to settle their differences.

Lawn and Patterson wrote and directed this one themselves, and you can feel the double grip on the material. It aired in April 2024, just under a year after the first series ended. The familiar faces are all back, Siân Brooke, Katherine Devlin, Nathan Braniff, Richard Dormer, Dearbháile McKinney, Martin McCann, Jonathan Harden, Joanne Crawford, Andrea Irvine and Andi Osho, with Frank Blake's Shane Bradley settling into the ranks. The camera work has the same restless energy as the first series, and the estate scenes carry a weight the station scenes don't.

There's a cumulative exhaustion to this opener that the first series couldn't have carried. The rookies have learned the job. Now they're learning what the job takes out of you, and that lesson is going to be a long one. The show has never been interested in easy wins, and it doesn't start here.