Episode 1

The season opens with three police officers shot dead during the hijack of a seized drugs transport. It is the kind of attack that makes national news and demands results, and AC-12 moves in to investigate the possibility of police collusion. The target is an organised crime group with links to corrupt officers, and the trail leads into the force itself. Nobody at the top is going to like where this goes. The hijack was planned, and planned well, which means somebody knew the route.

The episode sets up its world with grim efficiency. The hijack is brutal and specific, and the aftermath is all politics: who gets the case, who controls the narrative, who has something to hide. Arnott, Fleming and Hastings begin pulling at the threads. But the list of people with reasons to be worried is long, and the OCG has a reach that surprises even the investigators. The raid was too clean to be luck, and the team knows it within the first hour. The sense of a much bigger operation is established early, and the episode is in no hurry to show its hand.

Jed Mercurio wrote it, John Strickland directed. Stephen Graham arrives as John Corbett and immediately raises the temperature, with Rochenda Sandall's McQueen, Alastair Natkiel's Banks, Tomi May's Minkowicz and Gregory Piper's Pilkington making the criminal side properly menacing. Martin Compston's Arnott, Vicky McClure's Fleming, Adrian Dunbar's Hastings, Sian Reese-Williams's Cafferty and Maya Sondhi's Bindra hold the police side together. The new faces settle in quickly, and the old ones hold the centre.

The dead officers are the price of admission, and the show never forgets them. What follows is going to be about how far the rot goes, and who is prepared to follow it. But the episode promises a conspiracy that runs deep into the hierarchy, and the season starts as it means to go on. It is a confident opener, the kind that makes you clear the evening for the next one. The questions it raises are the kind the show likes: the kind that do not have easy answers.