Men Should Weep (1)

Penhaligon is hunting a serial rapist, a man who enjoys his work, and then the hunt turns on her. She becomes a victim herself, and the case stops being professional. It becomes the thing she carries into every room, and it changes what she can be around Fitz, who has his own way of making everything harder. And Somerville plays the change in her without ever saying it aloud, which is the harder trick. The rapist leaves no evidence behind, which is why he keeps getting away with it.

Floyd Malcolm is a black taxi driver whose anger has found a terrible outlet. The white men who disrespect him, he rapes their wives and destroys the evidence. His revenge is directed and cold, and Graham Aggrey plays him with a stillness that makes you understand how he gets away with it. The Malcolm family gathers around him: Marvin, Bev, Mrs Malcolm, each one caught in the gravity. The taxi is his territory, and the episode uses the city's streets the way the series always has, as a map of who owns what. The Malcolm family's loyalty is complicated by what Floyd has done, and the episode lets that sit without comment.

McGovern wrote it, Jean Stewart directed it, and the episode makes no effort to be comfortable. Penhaligon's assault is not a plot device; it is the event the whole story orbits. Fitz's wife returns in the middle of it, and his domestic chaos adds to the general wreckage. The episode is unflinching about what happens to Penhaligon, and the show trusts the audience to sit with it. There are no easy lines in the episode, and it refuses to draw any.

The two strands are the same strand. The rapist is out there, and the person hunting him is now one of his victims, and nothing about the case is straightforward anymore.