The Big Crunch (3)

Fitz goes to work on the Trants, and he brings his own complications with him. His affair with Penhaligon has started, which is the kind of distraction this job cannot afford, but he makes it his mission anyway: crack Kenneth Trant and his obedient family into admitting they killed the girl. They look breakable. They are not. The affair makes the case personal in a way the squad cannot see. And the case has already cost one innocent man his life, which Fitz carries into the interview room.

Michael Trant and Virginia Trant close ranks around Kenneth like a bodyguard of quiet certainty. Every question Fitz asks gets answered with the same serene conviction, and the harder he pushes, the more the family presents a single, polished wall. Around them the squad waits: Wise, Beck, Harriman, Skelton, all of them watching Fitz do the one thing he does best and worst. The wall the family presents is the point of the whole story. Wise keeps the pressure on from outside, but the real fight is happening in a room with no windows.

The episode finishes in the sect's church, and the showdown there is as destructive as anyone feared. Whitehead and Jarrold build to it slowly, letting the family's certainty curdle into something else. Jim Carter's Trant stays calm to the end, and the calm is the scariest thing in the room. The church is the right place for the end: a building built on faith, used for everything faith is supposed to forbid. The affair with Penhaligon gives every professional scene a private undertow, and Somerville and Coltrane play it without a word of explanation.

Nobody walks away clean. Fitz included, and he knows it. It is a dark close to a dark arc. The arc closes the way it opened, with certainty broken and nobody left to blame it on.