The Harrowing (1)

Rachel Price has lost her own daughter to suicide, and her first post-mortem back is a student from the same college, brutally murdered. The show hands her that double wound in the opening minutes and then gets out of her way. She carries it well, and so does the episode. The post-mortem room has never felt colder.

Red starts with the usual assumption: the killer knew the victim. But then a second woman dies in what looks like the same hand, and the theory collapses. The pattern Red thought he could see turns out to be something else entirely. The bleakest image arrives early and stays. Catherine McArdle, a twenty-year-old student, is locked in a car and abandoned on a rubbish dump, left to die in terrible circumstances. Her fate is presented as a warning about what is coming down the line.

The team chasing all of it is a good one: Red and Duncan Warren, joined by DS Vickie Clarke and the pathologist Rachel Price. They are racing a killer whose methods and motives sit beyond their reach, and the college setting gives the whole thing a closed, murmuring atmosphere. Nobody in those corridors can be fully ruled out, and the families circling the case bring their own tensions to the table. Rachel Price, in particular, is doing her job with a grief she can't set aside.

Terry Cafolla and Boris Starling wrote it, Paul Unwin directed. Ken Stott is Red, with Neil Dudgeon, Helen McCrory as Rachel Price and Maxine Peake as Vickie Clarke, plus Hugo Speer's Jack Price, Harriet Walter as Professor Robb, Adam Kotz, Beatie Edney, Margot Leicester and Eamon Boland around the edges.

It's a slow-burning opener, the kind that builds dread by accumulation rather than shocks. The threat is always just out of sight, waiting. It works.