Pilot (2)

The second half of the pilot starts with a shovel. Boyd has Alice Miller's body exhumed in the hope that newer DNA testing will name her killer where the old investigation couldn't. It's a grim way to open an episode, and entirely in keeping with a show whose whole premise is that evidence keeps its secrets longer than people do.

What the test eventually points towards is stranger than anyone expected. The kidnapper isn't after money, or at least not mainly after money. He wants revenge on Boyd's team specifically, which turns the case inside out: the detectives stop hunting a man through his past and start realising they're standing in his firing line. The killer clearly relishes this, taunting Boyd as the net closes, and there's one properly tense stretch where Mel agrees to pose as a police constable to bait him out. Decoy work is where these stories either convince or collapse. This one convinces, because everyone involved looks appropriately terrified.

Around that, the suspects shuffle past: Mrs Whitemore, Mr Harvey, Jimmy Marshall, all of them plausible and none of them quite fitting until late. The grievance behind it all stays personal rather than procedural, which is the right call. A revenge motive makes the squad itself part of the story instead of a set of observers with clipboards.

Barbara Machin wrote it, Martin Hutchings directed, and Trevor Eve holds the centre as Boyd, with Sue Johnston's Grace Foley, Holly Aird's Frankie Wharton, Wil Johnson's Spencer Jordan and Claire Goose's Amelia Silver around him. Elaine Claxton plays Mrs Whitemore, Finbar Lynch is Jimmy Marshall, David Sterne is Mr Harvey, Sam Loggin appears as Kelly Caldwell and Amelia Warner as Jodie Whitemore.

As a pair, these two hours do what a pilot should: establish the method, then complicate it. Ending the trial run with the team itself as the target was a bold choice, and the show earns it.