Doctor Hoffmann's Children

Van der Valk faces a run of deaths that refuse to sit still as a single case. A man falls. Someone is burned. Another drowns. A dog turns on its owner. And then there is a shooting. Five deaths, five very different methods, and no obvious thread to bind them. That is the puzzle handed to Piet at the start of the revival's fourth series: not a pattern he can read, but the absence of one.

The victims seem unconnected, and the means of killing vary so widely that the obvious reading is a killer with no fixed method at all. Piet is short on a signature, and shorter still on motive. What nudges the case forward is family. His daughter turns up the clue that lets him see the murders as one hand's work, and from there the pieces begin, slowly, to cohere. It is a small human moment in an otherwise cold sequence of killings, and the show is wise to lean on it.

Barry Foster carries the hour as Van der Valk, with Meg Davies as Arlette and Richard Huw as Wim rounding out the household. Ronald Hines is Samson, the hoofd commissaris who hovers at the edges of the investigation. The supporting cast gives the dead their own worlds: Tom Bell as Freddie Brugmans, Sara Kestelman as Monika Hendricks, Donald Churchill as Johnny Roos, Judy Cornwell as Harriet Kuyper, Philip Locke as Conrad Molenaar, and a young Amanda Burton as Elly Van Roekel. Nicolas Freeling and Jonathan Hales wrote it; Anthony Simmons directed.

I like that the episode trusts its audience to sit with confusion. Too many policiers would have handed us the linking device in the opening scene. Here the satisfaction comes from watching Piet earn the connection rather than be handed it. The serial-killer frame is familiar, but the writing resists the urge to explain the killer into a tidy theory. We get the murders, the method, and a detective who admits he is working without a map. That restraint is what makes the resolution land, even if the why behind the spree stays murkier than the format would like.