True Romance (2)

The admirer stops circling Fitz and goes for his son. Mark is targeted, and whatever professional distance Fitz had left evaporates. He needs the killer to stop looking at him, and he has an idea: give the investigation to someone else, so the admirer understands that the shrink's attention is no longer undivided. And Mark is the one person Fitz cannot be clever about, the episode knowing it. The threat to Mark is the one thing that has ever made Fitz abandon his own methods.

Irene Jackson takes the case. She agrees to the change, and the job undoes her. The nature of the work, the pictures of her dead students, all of it is too much to stomach, and she goes missing. The plan that was meant to protect Fitz's family ends up costing the one person who stepped in to help. The job was meant to be a shield, and it becomes a trap. Irene's disappearance turns the case inside out, because now there is a second missing person on the board.

Rosemary Martin's Irene is the heart of the episode, and the show is careful with her. Abbott and Fywell keep the admirer's threat ticking under every scene, and the squad, Wise, Penhaligon, Temple and Skelton, works around a case that keeps changing shape. Emily Joyce's Janice and Alan Maher's Frank Weetman fill out the edges. The episode spends its middle act on the quiet horror of a good person being ground down, and Martin earns every minute. The episode is quieter than its predecessor, and the quiet is worse.

Fitz traded places with someone, and it did not save anyone. The admirer is still out there, and Mark is still the target, and the season ends on a note that is anything but settled. The episode, and the season, close with the danger unresolved and the door left open.