The Gates of Light

Spector's condition stabilises, and the case turns to whether he can ever be brought to trial. His defence team, led by Sean Healy, works to keep him away from a jury. Spector is assessed by the hospital's staff and interviewed by his lawyers, whom he tells that he cannot remember any of the crimes with which he is charged. The doctors cannot say what has caused the memory loss, and an MRI that might supply an answer cannot be done because of the bullet fragments still in his body. Spector and his nurse, Kiera Sheridan, draw closer; he asks her why she is kind to him, and describes the near-death experience he reported from the operating table.

Gibson's team works through the notebooks and photographs recovered from Spector's lock-up, and concludes that there may be at least nine further stalking subjects, some of which may have become murders. Gibson instructs her officers to identify those women and find out whether they are alive or dead. DS Tom Anderson adds to this by looking into the list of boys who were at the Gortnacul children's home with Spector. He finds a David Alvarez, an inmate of the same home, who is serving life in England for the 2002 murder of a young woman, Susan Harper, in London, a killing committed in a gap in Spector's own timeline. The name is a paper lead at this stage, and Alvarez himself does not appear in the episode.

The Public Prosecution Service wants to pursue charges against Sally Ann Spector for aiding her husband. Gibson argues that Sally Ann has already lost her marriage, her work and her unborn child, but ACC Jim Burns does not accept that this should change the decision, and the charges proceed. Spector appears in court by video link from the hospital, charged with four counts of murder, one of attempted murder and one of unlawful imprisonment. When he cannot even give his address, his lawyers raise the question of his competence to take part in his own defence; the district judge commits the case to the crown court and orders his detention in a secure psychiatric unit for assessment under the psychiatrist Dr August Larson. Healy shows Spector photographs of his alleged victims. He recognises none of them until he is shown Rose Stagg, whom he says he last saw in 2002 and cannot explain leaving to die. Rose then visits Gibson and gives her account of the night Spector took her, including the videos he recorded of her; she says he never sexually assaulted her. At the end of the episode, Sally Ann, at the end of her endurance, drugs her two children with warm milk laced with sleeping pills and drives them to the coast.

The Alvarez lead is the episode's strength: a 2002 murder in London that predates the amnesia gives the investigation a way to charge Spector with something he cannot claim to have forgotten, and joins the 2012 inquiry to his earlier life through the single document that is the list of Gortnacul boys. Its weakness is density of process. The episode is loaded with the prosecution decision, the committal and the competence question, moves slowly, and drew the run's lowest audience, 3.06 million consolidated viewers.

Entertainment Weekly graded it A-, and the Vulture recap found its value in the interior lives of the women, especially Rose Stagg's scene, in which she describes the state she is left in after the abduction, telling Gibson she once thought she wanted love and security but now feels like she is floating free in a void. Vulture was also uneasy about what it called a troubling undercurrent of sympathy for Spector, while allowing that the series examines the idea rather than endorses it. The episode introduces Dr Larson and, through the Alvarez lead and the Susan Harper murder, gives the case its route around the memory defence, the thread that carries the remaining three.