Recoil (2)

Tired of sitting at home while other people solve her husband's murder, Maggie does the thing the rulebook exists to stop: she starts her own inquiry. The discipline of the first episode cracks open here, and the show is honest about what that costs. Her contact in the criminal world gives her a name, Jackie Frost, the arms dealer who supplied the gun. Armed with that, she goes to Chief Inspector Russell.

And then she resigns.

It's a blunt, powerful beat, played without melodrama. Gascoine delivers it as a decision made somewhere past exhaustion, and Marlowe's Russell gets a moment of quiet bafflement that sells the whole scene. Maggie isn't threatening anyone. She's simply done with waiting for permission, and the show lets that land without a single bar of music telling you how to feel.

The episode spends its time on the mechanics of her rogue investigation, and the detail is nicely old-fashioned: a tip-off, a name, a trail that leads wherever it leads. Brian Gwaspari joins as DI Bob Croft, and the regulars circle the edges. The Blandens are still there, Sue Nicholls and Brian Croucher as Joanne and Harry, with Stephen Yardley's Jed; James Ottaway's George Taylor gets some of the best lines as the station's resident voice of doom, and Derek Thompson's Fenton and Paul Moriarty's Barratt carry the legwork of a case that is really running on Maggie's fuel.

Brian Finch and Terence Feely wrote it, Christopher Hodson directed.

The clever thing about Recoil is that it doesn't pretend Maggie has a plan. She has information and a temper, and she's betting her whole career on a hunch about a gun dealer. Whether that's courage or recklessness is left for the viewer to decide. The series was two episodes old, and already asking which side of that line its heroine stood on.