Episode 1

The third season opens with Catherine Cawood finding the remains of a murder victim, and the discovery leads her, bizarrely, straight back to Tommy Lee Royce. There is a specific, horrible logic to it that the episode takes its time unpacking. Tommy has been out of the story, but he was never out of the valley. A body in the ground and a man in a cell should be separate cases. This show has never believed that for a second.

The investigation pulls in the everyday professionals of the town. Water engineers Alexis Platt and Danny Mellor have their routine work interrupted by the grim reality of a crime scene, and the show's habit of putting ordinary work next to extraordinary violence is as sharp as ever. The team around Catherine closes in: Shafiq Shah, Gorkem Tekeli, Andy Shepherd, DC Stead, Toby Millward, Binita Bhuppal. Every one of them is a face the valley has come to trust, and the episode uses that trust to make the discovery feel like a breach of the town itself.

The case itself is a fresh start for the force, a body with no obvious connection to the old wounds. That is what makes the pull back to Tommy so unnerving. Catherine can't walk past a crime scene without the past reaching up and taking hold, and the whole episode is built around that grip, around the way a new year keeps turning into an old one.

Sally Wainwright wrote it, and Patrick Harkins co-directed with her. Sarah Lancashire is Catherine, James Norton is Tommy, with Shane Zaza, Mete Dursun, Vincent Franklin, Danny Cunningham, Sara Bahadori and Jason Merrells in support.

It is a careful, slow-burning opener, more concerned with where Catherine's head is than with the mechanics of the case. That is the right instinct. The remains are new. The shadow they cast is very old.