Trial & Retribution XV: Rules of the Game (2)

Night two puts a working girl in the dock. Maryna, another of the women moving through Malikov's orbit, is on trial for assaulting him, and her defence is self-defence. Whatever she did to the billionaire, the trial around her is mishandled, the kind of legal shambles that makes you wonder whose interests the process is actually serving. Walker watches it go wrong and comes out of it harder than ever: he will get the Ukrainian, he says, and you believe him.

That's the trouble. Roisin looks at her boss and sees a man so fixed on Malikov that he can no longer see the murder. His obsession has a logic to it (the man is a bully with a fortune and friends in high places, and putting him away would feel like justice), but Sofia's actual killer is still out there, and Walker's certainty is now the biggest obstacle to finding them. So Roisin does what she has always been good at: she takes the investigation down a different route and lets him sulk about it. The friction between them is the best material in the episode. Two people who both want the right answer, pulling in opposite directions.

The records credit no writer or director for this half, and the cast list is thin (Nigel Pilkington among the various supporting players), so this will stay a short one on names. The drama doesn't suffer much for it. The story is doing the work: a botched trial, a stubborn DCS, and a DCI quietly following the evidence her boss has stopped looking at.

It resolves well. The second half of Rules of the Game earns its title twice over, first in the courtroom where the rules fail Maryna, then in the inquiry where Walker has to be dragged off his white whale before the real answer can surface. Sofia Petrenko finally gets what the first night denied her: someone actually looking for her killer.