True Romance (1)

It starts almost cosily. Fitz sees a patient privately, a woman having trouble with her husband, and for fifty pounds he tells her what she already knows: she should leave him. The advice is sound, and it costs him later, because someone has been watching him. Watching is not quite the word. The admirer wants something from Fitz, something close to love, and is willing to kill, and keep killing, to earn it. And the fifty-pound fee is the kind of detail the series loves: small, specific, and slightly disgraceful.

The episode turns from the small sadness of the consultation to the wrongness of being watched. The admirer is out there, methodical, and the violence arrives on Fitz's doorstep in a way he cannot interview his way out of. The stalker's violence is reported in fragments, which is scarier than showing it. The episode never shows the admirer, which is exactly right. Elizabeth Estensen's Reenie Wise sets the first thread going, and the cast around her, Emily Joyce's Janice, Katie Purslow's Louise, keeps the ordinary world turning while the threat settles in. The consultation scenes have a faint comedy to them that makes the rest of the episode darker by contrast.

Abbott wrote it, Tim Fywell directed it, and the tone is deliberately off: domestic and menacing in the same scenes. Coltrane plays Fitz's unease with the usual armour, but the cracks show. The episode aired in November 1995, deep into the third season, and it has the feel of a story built to test how much the audience will forgive its hero. Barbara Flynn's Judith and the Fitzgerald household keep the home front alive even as the threat closes in.

Someone loves him from a distance, and it does not feel like flattery. More like a countdown. It is the kind of open door the series does best.