Written in History

Two deadly incidents of racial hatred, more than twenty years apart, and Cade is left holding both of them. The older one will not stay in the past. It keeps reaching into the present, dragging the force back into a stretch of local history nobody wants to revisit, and the investigation has to pick its way through the fallout of things that happened long before most of these officers joined up. The distance in years makes it worse; the wounds have had decades to set.

The discomfort is the point. The two events look separate on paper, divided by time and circumstance, but the episode keeps returning to what connects them: a community that never finished reckoning with what was done to it. Cade's officers handle the procedural side, going through the motions the law requires, while Cade himself carries the moral weight of reopening wounds that were never properly closed. His job is to manage the present, and the past keeps barging in. The officers working the case are caught between history and procedure, which is a fair description of most police work.

Martin Shaw plays Chief Constable Alan Cade, with Julian Glover as Andrew Blake and Bosco Hogan as Deputy Chief Constable Wes Morton. Gillian Bevan is Det. Supt. Rose Penfold, Michael Cochrane is Nigel Crimmond and Davyd Harries is Sam Lester. Frederick Treves takes on Henry Parker, Julie Saunders is Adele Kumire, Damian Lunn plays PC Philip Coleman and Thomas Russell is PC Simon Bowyer. Jeffrey Caine and Anthony Read wrote it, and Richard Stroud directed.

But it is not comfortable television, and it should not be. The show's habit of letting its hero sit with difficult material instead of wrapping it up in an hour is put to good use here, and the ending earns its lack of easy answers. There is no tidy resolution, and the episode is brave enough to leave the mess visible.