Wounds of Deadly Hate

Two dreams frame this episode. Dr Larson, who has been given Gibson's dream journal to read the entry Spector left in it, telephones her about it. She explains that she keeps paper and pen at her bedside because she has taught herself to wake and write down what she has seen; Larson asks whether she sees dreams as a way of solving problems, and she says the sleeping mind may make connections faster than the waking one. The second dream is Spector's: he stands on the ledge of a tall building, looks down at the traffic and lets himself fall.

At the secure psychiatric unit, Larson briefs his staff on Spector: the mother who killed herself when he was eight, the absent father, the children's homes, and the memory loss, real or performed. His instruction is to approach the patient with respectful scepticism. Spector has begun a relationship with a fellow patient, Mark Bailey, a young man with no remorse for having raped and murdered his twelve-year-old sister. In London, DS Tom Anderson and PC Danielle Ferrington interview David Alvarez, the man serving life for Harper's 2002 killing. Alvarez first holds back, then, after Anderson mentions the dining hall at the Gortnacul home, describes what was done there to the boys: the staff rounded them up and made them perform for the men's entertainment. He recounts that Spector protected him from the home's headmaster, Father Jensen, who took a special boy each year; Spector was Jensen's choice, and the abuse he suffered was the worst of it. When Spector left and had to name a successor for Jensen, he passed over the boy Alvarez expected, and Alvarez has been grateful ever since, grateful enough to take the blame for a murder Spector committed. Every source consulted agrees on this account, and it overturns what Spector and Jensen both told Burns in series two, that Jensen never abused Spector.

The London inquiry also produces harder evidence: CCTV from the night Susan Harper died shows a man walking behind her and Alvarez, and a record places a Peter Baldwin at a London restaurant in the summer of 2002, reprimanded by his employer the night before the killing. Spector, who claims to remember nothing after 2006, is now tied to a crime inside the period he says he can recall. In court, Katie Benedetto is sentenced to a juvenile detention centre after violating her bail conditions and telling the judge she answers only to Spector. Dr Larson completes his assessment, questioning the value of Spector's journals and the reliability of the memory claim, and concludes that the amnesia is invented. The defence files an abuse-of-process application, and Healy presses Gibson on her private life, but nothing changes the position against his client.

The episode ends in the interview room. Anderson and Gibson bring Spector in with Healy and put the Alvarez material to him. They tell him that Alvarez is innocent and is protecting him, and that he is to be charged with Susan Harper's murder. Spector, caught out, remarks that the police are being clever: this is a charge that concerns a period of his life he says he can remember.

The Alvarez interview is the season's strongest single scene to this point, resolving the series' longest-running unanswered question and explaining why an innocent man went to prison in Spector's place. The weakness is exposition: the episode carries a great deal, and much of its legal material is discarded by the ending. The record does not settle Susan Harper's occupation, describing her across sources as a young woman, a law student and a party girl. Entertainment Weekly graded the episode A-, and the Vulture recap, headed A History of Violence, found its subject to be Spector's past and the way it has begun to haunt Gibson as well as her suspect.