To Say I Love You (3)

With Tina locked up, Fitz gets the time with her that the case has needed. What comes out is a family story. Tina's problems did not start with Sean. They started at home, and the damage done there is what she keeps provoking him into acting out. Fitz finally sees the shape of it, and the understanding makes the danger clearer, not smaller. And the sessions start hostile and stay that way, which is how Fitz likes them. What she says is not easy to hear, for Fitz or for the viewer.

Sean is still out, and now he has made the connection himself. Tina's family raised her hard, and Sean means to pay them back for it. Fitz pleads with Tina to cooperate, to give the police what they need before her boyfriend turns her childhood into a body count. She has to decide whose side she is on, and she has never been good at that. The family Tina came from is the case file nobody opened, and the episode makes you look at it.

The interrogation scenes are the best of the episode: Coltrane and Lynch going at it with the temperature rising and the clock running. Around them Eccleston's Billborough and Somerville's Penhaligon hold the procedural line, Mark and Judith Fitzgerald keep the home story alive, and the Chief Super hovers like bad weather. Parvez Qadir's petrol station attendant gets one small scene and makes it count. The scenes in the station corridors are as tense as the ones in the room.

McGovern's script uses the interview room as a way into the family, and it works. Sean was always going to go too far. Whether Tina would let him is the real question, and the episode leaves it hanging exactly where it should. It is the strongest of the three parts, because it finally lets Tina speak.