Iceberg

The title is the warning: most of the danger sits under the waterline. A loyalist gangland feud has the section working flat out, and the visible part of the episode is the policing and the containment. The part underneath is what Annie Conlon does on a night out. The feud is the engine of the hour; the night out is the gear change, and the two keep colliding all the way to the credits. The episode has the patience to let the feud breathe before it shows you the damage it does.

Annie's impetuous decision is the tip of her own iceberg, and the episode is patient with the aftermath. Katherine Devlin gives her that particular look of someone who can't quite believe what they've done, and the consequences don't arrive all at once, which is worse. Meanwhile the feud keeps grinding on, and the station keeps sending people out into it, knowing full well the next call could be the one that goes wrong. The episode never lets the personal strand drift away from the gangland one; they stay tangled, the way they would be in a real shift.

Lawn and Patterson wrote and directed again, and the double duty shows in how settled the tone is. The episode aired in April 2024, the second of the season's six. It's the kind of hour that rewards a second viewing, once you know where Annie's night out is heading. The ensemble is the same reliable company, Siân Brooke's Grace and Nathan Braniff's Tommy among them, with Katherine Devlin carrying the episode's private half. The public half belongs to the streets, and the show keeps those two halves pressing on each other throughout.

What lingers is the collision. A private moment and a public emergency shouldn't be able to hit each other. But in this job they're on the same street, and the episode doesn't hurry the mess. It rewards watching the small scenes as closely as the big ones.