Betrayed (1)

Betrayed opens with a raid on a massage parlour, the kind of place that looks lawful enough until the squad walks in. What they find is worse than the usual vice: the young women working there have been smuggled into the country from refugee camps in Eastern Europe and forced into prostitution. The parlour is a front for human trafficking, and the scale of it sits heavier than a normal brothel bust. Chappel reads the set-up at once, but reading it and proving it are two different jobs.

And the case gets personal for Joe Robinson. His marriage is already under strain, and he becomes emotionally entangled with one of the witnesses the squad is trying to protect. That is a familiar hazard of the work, but the episode treats it with some care, letting the line between duty and feeling blur without turning Robinson into a cartoon. The witness in question is one of the women the squad has come to free, and the pull between them is the emotional core the episode keeps returning to.

Anita J. Pandolfo wrote the episode and Philippa Langdale directed. Ken Stott is Chappel, with Caroline Catz's Hutchins beside him. Garry Cooper's Supt. Jeff Callard and David Harewood's Robinson support the inquiry, and Diane Parish is Shirley Robinson. The trafficking story is carried by Branka Katic's Sofia, with David Schofield's Harrison, Elizabeth Berrington's Julie Evans, Valerie Edmond's DI Greer, and Michael Byrne as the solicitor. It is a large cast for a tight story, and most are there to show the machinery tightening around the girls.

This is The Vice at its most uncomfortable, and it does not look away. The show is good on the mechanics of exploitation, but here the human cost is the point. I found Sofia's thread the hardest to watch, which is probably the intention. It is a grim, necessary hour.