Angel Eyes

The murder of a musician pulls Jardine and the team into Glasgow's gay community, and the case does not let them keep their distance. A second killing with the same method follows, and the truth behind the murders turns out to sit somewhere Jardine would rather not look. The episode does not pretend that is easy. Two deaths in the same style mean a pattern, and a pattern means someone is still out there. The case takes the team into rooms and conversations they would not normally see, and the show treats that as part of the job.

DC Stuart Fraser has his own trouble. His secret is no longer safe, and a former boyfriend outs him. The personal and the professional run side by side, and neither gives the other much room to breathe. Fraser's storyline is handled without melodrama, which makes it land harder.

But the hardest work is Jardine's own prejudice, and the episode does not pretend it is easy to shift. It is one of the more uncomfortable episodes of this period, and the discomfort is the point. The series treats the community it is depicting with more care than you would expect from mid-nineties television. There is a patience to the episode that a lesser show would have traded for speed.

Glenn Chandler wrote it, Marcus D.F. White directed. James MacPherson and Blythe Duff lead, with Colin McCredie as Fraser, Iain Anders as McVitie and Robert Robertson as Dr Andrews. Ralph Riach's Gerald Gardiner, Duncan Duff's Stephen Harding, Owen Gorman's Andy Swanney, Jackie Morrison's Suzy Carroll and Kinny Gardner's Nicki Garland complete the line-up.

Whatever the verdict on the case, Fraser's life is changed, and Jardine's reckoning with himself is the kind that does not end with the investigation. The case gets an answer; the questions the episode asks about its own detectives do not get such a tidy one.