My Adventurous Song

Two investigations move towards their crises in the same hour. The corruption inquiry: DCI Matthew Eastwood tells Burns that he traced a call made from Olson's phone to a hotel room, and that the call was made by DI Rob Breedlove. Eastwood links the room to Aaron Monroe, to Aaron's father Morgan Monroe, and to a prostitution and drug business, and to a serious assault that happened in the same suite on the night Olson was killed.

Confronted with the findings, Breedlove kills himself. Burns takes the case to Morgan Monroe and warns him off, and Eastwood later accuses Burns of tipping the Monroes off, which lets Aaron go on the run. The strand ends unresolved, with the dead detective's own conduct, and Gibson's night with him, now inside a Discipline and Complaints investigation that reaches her.

The murder inquiry turns on the killer's overreach. Spector is reprimanded at work for making an unannounced house call to his client Liz Tyler, a woman being abused by her husband, James Tyler; he arranges for Liz to go to a refuge and for her husband to be arrested, and Jimmy Tyler's grievance, and Spector's warning to stay away from his wife, become the fuel for a later attack. Gibson receives a letter Spector has sent anonymously to Sarah Kay's father, Ian Kay, saying he would not have killed Sarah had he known she was pregnant. She reads it not as remorse but as annoyance that what he saw as a perfect murder had been spoiled, and she allows Ian Kay to make a public appeal on television. Separately, Prof. Reed Smith's friend Rose Stagg comes forward with an account from years earlier, when as a student she had a sexual encounter with a man she knew only as Peter who tried to strangle her; she provides the basis for a photofit.

The record ends with Spector's fourth attack. He goes to the home of Annie Brawley and finds her with her brother. Spector kills the brother, credited as Joseph Brawley and named Jack Brawley in some sources, and attacks Annie. The sequence runs several minutes and is the most prolonged violence in the series; she survives it, badly injured. Spector's daughter Olivia, meanwhile, is drawing disturbing pictures and waking at night, and her father's hidden life is now being felt inside his own house.

The episode's strength is the double exposure, the suicide of a corrupt detective and the collapse of a killer's method in the same hour, which makes it the season's turning point rather than filler. The weakness is the corruption strand's abrupt resolution: Breedlove is exposed and dead within a short sequence, and the gunman who killed Olson is never identified, so the record closes a plot without answering its central question. Structurally it matters more than it looks. It closes the corruption investigation's first phase with a suicide, sets up the Tyler strand that drives the next series, and stages the attack that leaves the series' one surviving victim able to identify Spector.

It introduces Rose Stagg, the survivor whose account later becomes central, and it is the record most often cited in the argument about the show and violence against women. Cubitt wrote his own defence of that violence for the Guardian the week this episode and the finale were broadcast, arguing the drama begins with the lesser predatory behaviours before the killing. Its audience of 4.28 million on BBC Two was the first rise of the run after the dip in the third record.