Accidental Death

A prominent local journalist dies, and the death is recorded at least initially as an accident. The unit is not satisfied that it was one, and the episode is built on the question its listings state plainly: accident or murder.

The method is to occupy the two places where the answer would naturally sit. Doran goes under cover as a reporter on the dead man's old desk, which puts her among his colleagues, his editor, his contacts and his unfinished work. Willis becomes a coroner's officer, which puts him inside the machinery that decides how a death is classified. Between the two positions they hold both sides of the case: what the journalist was working on when he died, and how his death was written up.

The investigation works by comparison. What the newspaper knew, what its staff will say, and what the dead man had been pursuing do not agree with the account that entered the coroner's record. The unit establishes that the death was not accidental and that the misclassification was the point, because a death which should have been investigated was allowed to be recorded as something else. The responsible party is identified from what the pair recover between the newsroom and the coroner's office, and the consequence is the correction of the record.

This is a procedural whose subject is procedure, and the casting of Willis inside it is a good use of a character normally given the physical work. Doran's reporting assignment is her strongest of the first series after Silver Lining. William Russell appears as Bamford Harker, the senior figure of a newspaper family, some years after leading British television roles in The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and the first two series of Doctor Who, and Briony McRoberts plays against him as Cassandra Harker.

The episode's director credit is the one place in Series 1 where the Wikipedia episode table is demonstrably wrong. It names a production department person with no directing credit on the series anywhere; the direction established elsewhere is Philip Draycott's. The dossier records the Wikipedia column as unreliable rather than as a variant.

Where it thins is in the record rather than the episode. The published summaries establish the question and the structure and stop there, and the detail of how the newsroom and the coroner's office are drawn together is not set out in any listing consulted. What the episode has to offer a modern viewer is the shape of its idea: a death that becomes a story, and a police unit that has to get behind the version of events everyone has agreed to.