His Troubled Thoughts

The case now has an accused man but no usable route to trial. Gibson and ACC Jim Burns are questioned separately by the Police Ombudsman and the Policing Executive about the conduct of the operation, and especially about the shooting of Spector in police custody. Burns tells Gibson that Spector's name is to be released to the press as the arrested suspect in the Belfast Strangler case, because the information is already circulating and the force must get ahead of it. He also questions her judgement in putting DS Tom Anderson on the task force, and admits he looked into the fact that Gibson and Anderson had travelled to work together; his interest in her is personal as well as professional. Under her own questioning, Gibson answers most of the Ombudsman's points, but falls silent when asked why Spector was standing in the open, unrestrained, when he was shot.

Katie Benedetto, kept from Spector by her bail conditions, takes revenge on a former friend who has spoken to the press about Spector by squirting concentrated lemon juice into the girl's eyes, and begins to plan something of her own around the case. In hospital, Rose Stagg sees Spector wheeled past on a trolley, has a panic attack, discharges herself and is reunited with her husband Tom and their daughter. Spector regains consciousness and tells the staff he believes he was hurt in a car accident and that the year is 2006. He fails to recognise his daughter Olivia, because in his mind she is still a small child, and does not know he has a son. When Nurse Kiera Sheridan attends him he grips her hard enough to hurt her and has to be sedated; she says she is unharmed. Sally Ann has engaged one of Belfast's best-known defence solicitors, Sean Healy, and Healy and his colleague Louise Wallace begin work on the defence, including the question of whether Spector is fit to stand trial at all.

At the end of the episode Gibson's team searches a lock-up rented by Spector under the name Baldwin. Inside they find the car he had been using to hold Rose, food he had been taking to her, underwear kept from earlier victims, and a batch of further notebooks. The journals raise the possibility of more victims than the case has so far counted.

The episode turns on Spector's claimed amnesia, which converts a confessed killer into a defendant with no memory of his crimes and reopens a case the audience thought closed; it also moves the pressure of the season from the killer onto the defence team. The device divides opinion, read by some reviewers as a legitimate legal puzzle and by others as a soap-opera contrivance, and the episode does little to settle the question in its own running time. No source consulted resolves whether the memory loss is real, and the series keeps it open into the final episode, where the collapse of the defence implies it was a performance.

Entertainment Weekly graded the episode B+ and found the shift from chase to legal jeopardy the season's most interesting move, while the Vulture recap was harsher, calling the amnesia twist something it would expect from a night-time soap rather than from a crime drama that prides itself on a careful, slow build. The episode states its institutional argument directly through Gibson, who tells the new task-force member Danielle Ferrington that they have chosen to work in a masculine paramilitary patriarchal culture and must not let it beat them. It sits as the second part of the run and formalises the legal problem, and the fitness-to-plead question, that carry the rest of it.