The Hell Within Him

The episode opens inside DSU Stella Gibson's sleep. In a candle-lit bath she feels a man take her hand; it is Spector, and he pushes her under the water and holds her there. She wakes into a second dream, of her father rousing her while she asks for five more minutes. Gibson now keeps paper and pen at her bedside and writes down what she dreams.

Sally Ann Spector's car is found half-submerged in the rising tide and rescued before the water takes it; Sally Ann and her two children are pulled out and taken to Belfast General Hospital, the same hospital as the man who caused it. Gibson asks Burns what frame of mind Sally Ann was in to believe her children would be better off dead, and Olivia answers Gibson's visit with a hug rather than words. Dr Larson continues his work with Gibson, who tells him about Spector's sexual behaviour and high intelligence, and warns him never to lose sight of the fact that the man is dangerous; the two disagree about whether Spector is a patient or a prisoner.

An MRI, finally possible once the bullet fragments allow it, shows no physical explanation for the loss of memory. Spector's legal team attacks the confession he gave Gibson in series two, arguing that it was informal, unrecorded and shaped by her unorthodox dealings with him, and demands her personal dream journal, in which Spector left a message when he broke into her hotel room, putting her private material into the case. Spector goes through the evidence with his lawyers and remembers none of it; told that Katie is only sixteen, he beats his own head and has to be calmed by Kiera Sheridan. DS Tom Anderson is sent to London to press the Susan Harper files through Gibson's old Met command.

Before Spector leaves for the secure unit, Kiera slips him a folded twenty-pound note; he opens his hand to look at it at the ward doors and lets it fall, and the unit's CCTV records the moment. Gibson, watching the footage, collects the note on her way out. Written on it is "He that loves not abides in death", from the First Epistle of John. Rose Stagg then agrees to a further interview and, with the recorder off, expands her account: the relationship was never one act of choking, the games grew more extreme, he wanted her to lie still as if dead and to put a bag over her own head, and once he revived her afterwards. He told her men could "become gods on earth through a certain type of sex", and she believes he went to London after they separated. Gibson admits her handling of the inquiry probably led Spector to Rose's door, and Rose tells her she is glad not to be the only one who has made mistakes.

This is the episode reviewers rated highest of the season to that point, largely for the dream sequence, the only sustained passage in which the case is seen from inside Gibson's own mind; the Vulture recap called her performance challenging, electrifying and emotionally honest and judged the episode the best so far, while Entertainment Weekly graded it B. Its weakness is the legal strand, argued largely from the sidelines and overtaken by the ending. It sits as the pivot of the run, handing the initiative to the defence and the psychiatric system and moving Spector out of the hospital; the note Kiera leaves becomes one of the series' final images.