Silence and Suffering

Series two ended in woodland outside Belfast with three men shot, and this one opens in the aftermath of that volley. Paul Spector, hit at close range, is taken to Belfast General Hospital and into surgery, where Dr Joe O'Donnell and his team work for a long stretch to keep him alive, remove his spleen and leave him in intensive care. DSU Stella Gibson arrives with blood on her hands and clothes and waits through the procedure. DS Tom Anderson, shot in the arm, is told the wound may leave lasting nerve damage.

Recovering, Anderson asks why Gibson ran to Spector rather than to him, and why she sounded anguished. She tells him she did not want Spector to die before a court could reach him: she wanted him to survive, to be tried and sentenced and to spend the rest of his life in prison, because a death in custody would deny the victims' families that outcome. ACC Jim Burns defends her running of the operation to his superiors and argues that she should stay as senior investigating officer. Rose Stagg, held for days in the boot of her own car, is in the same hospital, physically stable but not speaking. At the Spector family home, Sally Ann tells the children their father was in a road accident, while Olivia, his older daughter, finds news coverage online identifying her father as the man arrested in the Belfast Strangler murders. Katie Benedetto watches the shooting reported on television, barred by her bail conditions from approaching him.

A nurse, Kiera Sheridan, is assigned to Spector's bedside. Spector briefly opens his eyes while she has turned away, then closes them again as she looks back, establishing before anyone else in the hospital knows it that he is conscious and aware. In the hospital concourse, an elderly patient Gibson does not know mistakes her for someone else, calls her sweetheart and says she is glad she has come; Gibson sits with her and holds her hand in silence. The woman's identity is not established in any source consulted.

The episode's strength is its reframing of the series from chase to consequence, and the clarity of Gibson's position that Spector must be kept alive for trial rather than allowed to die in custody. It is a colder, slower opening than the two series before it, and reviewers differed sharply over whether the change worked. Its honest weakness is the length of the operating-theatre passage: several critics found that stretch low on tension precisely because the audience knows Spector survives, and The Atlantic called the pace achingly, maddeningly ponderous.

The premiere drew mixed to negative notices for its hospital-heavy focus, and the series as a whole carries a 64 per cent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. The sustained critical argument about the show's violence against women gathered around this run, with The Times framing its review around the question of whether The Fall was the most misogynistic show on television. The dossier records no direct reply from the programme-makers to that charge beyond a rowdy question-and-answer session at the BFI after this episode was previewed, at which Allan Cubitt took the lightest criticism. As the opener of the final series the episode departs furthest from the hunter-versus-hunted structure that drove the first two, replacing it with a legal and medical holding pattern.