What Is in Me Dark Illumine

What Is in Me Dark Illumine opens where the previous episode left off, at the site of Spector's burnt-out car. Studying satellite imagery, Gibson spots an abandoned building nearby that the search teams have not covered, drives there, and has an officer cut the padlock with bolt cutters. Inside she finds the chair and the tripod where Rose Stagg was filmed, and evidence that she was held there. Rose herself is gone. The line about fetching the bolt cutters, delivered as ordinary procedure, is the one Fiona Apple later took for the title of her 2020 album.

In custody, Spector will talk only to Gibson; everyone else who tries to interview him is refused. Gibson has Anderson interview Katie Benedetto on the ground that he physically resembles Spector, and Katie gives a graphic and largely false account of her relationship with him. A gussied-up Gail McNally is then sent to try to shake him, and Spector sees through the tactic at once and says so, knowing Gibson is watching on camera. The information the police do get comes from elsewhere. Sally Ann Spector, told during questioning what her husband is charged with, suffers a miscarriage. The owner of the hotel where Spector stayed, a man who has filmed his guests, provides hours of footage, including the bondage between Spector and Katie. Olivia Spector is questioned and protects her father, lying about the drawings, the necklace and the woman in the roof, and Gibson tells Burns what the child's loyalty shows. Jimmy Tyler, still hunting his wife, gets hold of a journalist's car and phone, finds the women's refuge in Bangor where Liz is living, and attacks Liz and the other residents before leaving.

With the evidence mounting, Eastwood charges Spector with the remaining murders. Spector answers that he will talk to Gibson and no one else, and Burns argues against it, because Spector has read her journal and knows how to use it. The interview that follows is the first time the two characters speak face to face. Spector confesses to all of his murders. He refuses to say where Rose is. He uses her journal to taunt her, offering an interpretation of her relationship with her dead father; Gibson answers calmly, rejects his account of himself, and keeps the interview under control. She does not get Rose's location. That night Gibson and Anderson sleep together. The next morning Eastwood tells her that Spector has agreed to take the team to a place in the woods in exchange for a visit from his daughter. Olivia is brought to the station; Spector tells her that watching her grow up has been the best thing in his life, and is led out in civilian clothes and cuffs to direct the search. The journalist who has been receiving leaked information is tipped off, and Jimmy Tyler learns where the convoy is going. In the woods, Gibson walks to the site Spector has named and finds a car with Rose Stagg in the boot, barely alive; she has been left with snacks and water, and has marked her own arm. As the rescue party emerges, Jimmy Tyler opens fire. He shoots Spector and Anderson, and is shot dead himself. Gibson runs to Spector and cradles him as he bleeds, saying that they are losing him.

The episode ends there. Whether Spector lives or dies is left unresolved by design; the final shot is Gibson holding the man she has spent two series hunting. The record's strength is the interview, the scene two series were built to deliver, and both leads treat it as the event it is. Its weakness is the ending: the cliffhanger leaves the fate of the wounded undecided and disposes of Rose as a device, and the Guardian's two verdicts both treated that as a failure to pay off the season. What sets the finale apart is its format, ninety minutes in which most of the running time is interrogation and the violence is kept for the last minutes. It changes the show's engine from pursuit to custody. It was the most watched of the six episodes, at 3.60 million in the UK, and the Fiona Apple connection put it back in circulation years after transmission. The BBC had announced the feature length in advance, with its drama controller calling the conclusion wonderfully shocking, and the episode itself does not resolve what follows.