Vengeance Is Mine (1)

The season opens with Eric Metcalfe stabbed to death in a busy market, watched by Susan, who can't pick the killer out of the crowd. Eric had only recently made his peace with his brother Red, which makes the timing feel deliberate. It is. But something older is being settled here, and the episode takes its time showing what.

The pattern shows itself in odd, patient ways. Russ Collier and his sister Jenny are found dead days later, each with a cheese wire in their hand. Two years earlier they were suspects in the murder of the loan shark John Hardy. DCI Charlie MacIntyre let them walk and put Davor Pasovic away instead, a man who never stopped protesting his innocence. Davor's brother Alexi is brought in, and the smooth lawyer Daniel Jameson makes sure nothing sticks. Red asks MacIntyre outright whether he framed Davor just to close the file. He doesn't get an answer that helps.

The killings keep matching old cases. Philip Stansfield dies on the railway line where Felicity Oldroyd was murdered; Des Braithwaite, her married lover, had been arrested by DI Wilby and pleaded innocence; Stansfield, it emerges, had also been seeing her and had lied about it. Red starts to read the run of deaths as an avenger clearing up the mistakes of old investigations. Then Charlie MacIntyre's daughter Mandy is garrotted with a cheese wire, and the target list widens. Officers who made fatally wrong arrests are on it, and so is everyone they love.

Lizzie Mickery, Robert Cooper and Boris Starling wrote it, David Richards directed. Frances Grey's Kate Beauchamp anchors the team alongside Alun Armstrong's MacIntyre, with Gillian Taylforth, Emily Joyce, Tom Anderson, Paul Ansdell, Patrick Baladi, Greg Bennett, Dani Biernat and Ben Boorman around them.

Red ends the hour warning his staff that their nearest and dearest are in the firing line. He is not exaggerating.