Episode 2

The bombing campaign that opened the series is still intensifying, and this week the trouble spills out of the estates and onto the streets. The far-right group English Flag take to the pavements, blaming Islamists for the attacks, and the episode shifts its attention from the devices themselves to what the fear does to a city. Community tensions that have been simmering reach a visible breaking point, and every piece of police work now carries political fallout as well as criminal enquiry.

Lana is back in the middle of it, and this time the job is as much about managing people as defusing bombs. The investigation has to run against a backdrop of unrest, with officers working a public mood that is close to boiling over. A simple stop or interview carries extra weight now, and every decision, from who gets pulled in to who gets let go, has an audience. The show is good at letting that pressure show up in faces and silences rather than announcing it. McClure holds the centre without breaking a sweat, which is exactly what the part needs.

Daniel Brierley wrote it and Gilles Bannier directed it, and the tone stays tight. The ensemble is well served. Warren Brown's Karl Maguire and Kerry Godliman's Sonya Reeves join the picture, Kris Hitchen turns up as John Hudson, and Ewan Mitchell's Billy Washington is among the new faces. Cal MacAninch, Nadine Marshall, Mark Stanley and Manjinder Virk keep the procedural side solid, with Ralph Ineson's Commander Bregman looming over the whole thing, which is exactly what a Commander Bregman should do. Nobody here is scenery.

But this is also where the series shows its teeth as social drama as much as thriller. It catches the sour atmosphere of a city on edge, and the fracture between communities and the police is drawn without much comfort. The episode earns its grimness. This one asks how long a city can stay polite while its nerves are being worked on, and it doesn't pretend to have an easy answer. It leaves you unsettled, and it means to.