The Mind Is Its Own Place

The Mind Is Its Own Place opens on the aftermath of Spector's break-in. Forensics officers work through Gibson's hotel room, dusting for prints and bagging her laptop and her journal. At the station, Gibson searches for the artwork Spector set as her computer wallpaper and finds it, an eighteenth-century image, the Fuseli painting The Nightmare. The offence of the episode is that Spector has read her private writing and left a message in it, and Gibson has to work knowing how much of herself is now in the hands of the man she is hunting. The title comes from Milton's Paradise Lost and describes the mind's power to make its own heaven or hell.

The surveillance operation becomes the plot. DC Glen Martin and DC Gail McNally lead a team sent to install closed-circuit cameras and microphones in the suspect's home while the family is out. The operation goes wrong: the ceiling of the master bedroom gives way under the team, and rather than withdraw they rig a water-tank leak to explain the damage. The ceiling does not open far enough to reveal the hiding place where Spector keeps his journals, but the officers photograph a childhood picture with the initials PB on the back, a name that does not fit the one Spector uses, and find the original of the drawing he sent to Sarah Kay's family in the first series.

A body is found that appears at first to answer the question of Rose Stagg. The discovery is announced as a possible match for Rose, and the team is sent to the scene, but the dead woman turns out to be a heroin addict who hanged herself. Gibson decides to use the mistake. She has the young and eager DS Tom Anderson, newly attached to the investigation, withhold from the press the fact that the woman is not Rose, so that Spector believes the police think Rose is dead. Spector returns home to find the house wrecked by the botched operation, and Katie keeps supplying him with a false alibi while he draws her further into his plans. In one exchange he tells her that his mother killed herself when he was a child and leaves her with the idea that there is suffering all around and no reason not to take pleasure from it.

The episode's other discovery is professional rather than forensic. Gibson works out that Spector has been counselling Annie Brawley, the woman he attacked, and that he is due at her hospital room within the half hour. Gibson arrives first, has Annie moved to a bathroom as Spector comes up in the lift, and waits out his visit. Annie, unknowingly, has been talking to her attacker and describes him warmly. After Gibson lets her work towards it herself, Annie remembers: the man in the bar, the night she lost her driving licence, the man who attacked her.

The record's strength is that reversal, the victim counselled by her attacker finally naming him, staged as an act of memory rather than a revelation. Its weakness is pace: the bugging operation and the false body consume most of the running time without advancing the case far beyond where the previous episode left it. What distinguishes it is that its plot turns on a deliberate deception of the press by the police, a more compromised tactic than the series has used before. It is a mid-series holding pattern with three diaries in it at once, Spector's log of his victims, the false journal Katie has written to give him alibis, and Gibson's journal into which Spector has written. It also introduces Colin Morgan as Tom Anderson and puts Annie's memory and Spector's journals in place as evidence the finale depends on. No source consulted names the dead woman, and her relationship to any earlier plot strand is not established.