The Big Crunch (2)

Joanna is still alive, and Kenneth Trant does not like it. He had trusted Dean Saunders to dispose of her body, and the failure sits between them like a live wire. With Joanna in hospital, Beck works on Dean and gets a confession out of him. Fitz pushes for the truth underneath it, persuading Wise to see Dean in his cell, and all the while he has the feeling it is already too late. The confession is the easy part; the truth underneath it is the hard part, and Fitz knows the difference.

Alongside that runs a smaller, sadder thread. One of Trant's workers, a man with learning difficulties, is arrested after a death at the hospital. Fitz cracks him easily and finds the man is innocent, and the discovery is too much for him. He takes his own life out of guilt he did not earn. And the worker is the episode's most tragic figure, the show refusing to flinch from what it does to him. The hospital scenes with Joanna are the quiet centre of the episode, and Morton makes them count.

Whitehead's script and Jarrold's direction keep both threads running in parallel, and neither one lets the audience off. Darren Tighe's Dean is a man in over his head, and Morton's Joanna, hurt but alive, keeps the stakes human. The Barnes parents, Ellie Haddington and Roger Sloman, wait outside the story and break your heart by doing nothing at all. Lottie Ward's nurse and Jeffrey Longmore's local PC are small presences, but they keep the hospital and the street feeling real. The confession Beck pulls from Dean is exactly what the police wanted and exactly the wrong thing.

The sect is closing ranks. Fitz can feel the lie moving underneath it, and he still cannot quite reach it in time. The episode ends with the interview room feeling smaller than it should.