Trial & Retribution XX: Siren (2)

Imogen is gone, taken by the drug smuggling gang her boyfriend ran with, and her mother Tanya stands in front of the cameras making an appeal for her safe return. Fiona Mollison plays it as a woman holding herself together in public while coming apart in private, and it's one of the better things in the episode. The appeal is genuinely hard to watch, partly because by now you suspect the family knew more than they ever let on.

The other complication runs between Roisin and McGill. Their joint operation starts badly, all bruised egos from part one, then settles into something warmer. Rather beyond the call of duty, as the plot summary puts it with admirable understatement. Things happening between McGill and Connor threaten the investigation, and for once that hoary old chestnut of a storyline lands, mostly because Vincent Regan and Victoria Smurfit play it as two professionals who know better and do it anyway. The warmth is the danger. Every scene between them is one more thread for the case to snag on, and the show never lets the affair become a sideshow.

Then Imogen turns up again, alive, and the relief doesn't last long. She knew far more about the attack on the ambulance than she ever claimed. She may even have had a hand in it. The grieving It girl was, at minimum, lying from her first interview onward, and the episode is honest enough to let that reframe everything she did before without spelling out the whole ledger. Claudia Coulter appears as Christine and Alki David as Hikmet.

Julian Holmes directs; no writer is credited on this one.

It's a solid middle hour, more interested in people than in procedure. Tanya appealing for a daughter who may have arranged her own abduction is the sort of irony this show has always handled well, and the McGill-Connor entanglement gives the final stretch somewhere uncomfortable to go. It is a knowing hour, and that suits a series like this better than greatness would.