The Rapture (2)

Walker has to unpick his own first impressions here. He was wrong about the bombing, and admitting it reshapes everything. The murders are connected after all, and they may be religious hate crimes rather than the work of a lone madman. That is colder, in a way. A pattern with belief behind it is harder to break than one with nothing behind it. Hate crimes don't end with one arrest. The team has to walk back weeks of assumptions, and nobody does that gracefully.

The killer's message has been deciphered, and understanding it drags Walker deeper into a past that seems to run parallel to the killer's mission. His own history keeps lining up with the case, and the episode lets that echo work on him. Around him the personal threads tighten. Mel gets in deep with Joseph's main suspect, further than is sensible. The entanglement is the kind of choice that gets detectives in trouble, and it reads as deliberate. Terry is lying to the woman he secretly loves, and the lie is wearing him down. Everyone is carrying something they can't put down before the climax.

The title hangs over all of it. The Rapture approaches, and the show treats it less as a promise than as a threat, a coming event nobody in this story is ready for. Whatever the word means to the killer, to the people on the ground it just means more bodies.

Oliver Brown wrote it, Harry Bradbeer directed. The ensemble stays strong, with Mark Asante, Ayça Ayabakan, Sasha Behar, R.M. Clarke, Denise Gough, Laura Greenwood, Conor Grimes, Sean Hanrahan, Diana Kent and Bernadette Dobbin in support.

Two episodes, one long descent. It ends on a note of judgement, which feels right for a story this devout and this blood-soaked. By the end, the title means something precise, and it isn't a comfort.