Appearances Can Be Deceptive

The case begins almost closed. A woman has killed her husband, and the husband was abusive, so Maggie Forbes reads the situation as self-defence. It's hard to argue with the obvious reading, and the woman's story holds together. But then new facts arrive, and they are disturbing enough that Maggie has to take the whole thing apart and start again. Nothing about the first hour of the case survives contact with the second.

The episode's method is patience. Every comfortable conclusion gets re-tested, and the details are re-read until they give something up. The witnesses are questioned more than once, and the details that change between tellings are where the story lives. Maggie dismantles her own first impression piece by piece, and the show trusts the audience to keep up. There are no chases to hide behind, and the suspense lives in what the witnesses are not saying.

What looks like justice for a victim and what looks like the truth turn out to be different things, and the episode is not shy about the gap. The title does the warning work, and the script honours it. It holds two ideas at once: that an abused woman deserves every sympathy, and that the dead man is still owed the truth.

William Marlowe, who plays Russell, co-wrote it with Terence Feely, and Gerald Blake directed. Jill Gascoine carries the case as Maggie, with Paul Moriarty as Jake Barratt and Kevin O'Shea as Peter Phillips. Michael Graham Cox plays Jack Slater, Bernard Holley is Mike Turnbull, and around them come Nigel Rathbone's Steve Forbes, James Ottaway's George Taylor, Avis Bunnage as Auntie Win and Lysette Anthony as Karen.

A fine piece of television about the facts that refuse to sit still. Maggie earns her certainty the slow way, and the episode earns its ending the same way. It is the kind of episode that rewards a second viewing, when you already know which questions to ask.