Anger Management (2)

The second half starts by settling the argument: the dead man in the halfway house was murdered, full stop, and the prime suspects narrow to three of its inmates. Two of them have ties to Phil Brown, a jazz club owner with a shady streak a mile wide. Then the case commits the ultimate indignity. The murder weapon, already linked to execution-style killings going back years, is stolen from Frankie Wharton's laboratory, and Brown is shot with it before anyone can work out what's happening.

Which is when the shape of the whole thing changes. When the stolen gun turns up at another murder, suspicion lands on the first victim's gopher. And a worse possibility surfaces underneath it all: the original killing might have been a case of mistaken identity. Someone died because they were standing in for somebody else. The show lets that sit there, cold.

Meanwhile Boyd has his own problem. His anger management sessions start producing peculiar side effects, and Grace and Frankie find themselves increasingly creeped out watching their boss become serene. It's the episode's best running gag precisely because nobody in it trusts calm. This is a squad built on grief and stubbornness; a mellow Boyd is somehow more alarming than a shouting one.

John Milne, Andy Hay and Barbara Machin wrote it, Andy Hay directed, shown across two nights in August 2004. Trevor Eve leads as Det Supt Peter Boyd, Sue Johnston plays Dr Grace Foley, Holly Aird Dr Frankie Wharton, Claire Goose DS Amelia Silver and Wil Johnson DI Spencer Jordan. Nigel Terry returns as Sam Jacobs, T.P. McKenna as Phil Brown and Q as Mark Andrews, joined by Arnold Wesker, yes, the playwright, as Rabbi Reg Solomon, and Helen Schlesinger as Rebecca Jacobs.

It's a knottier hour than part one, and better for it. A stolen gun, a wrong man buried, and a killer who keeps finding uses for other people's weapons. The anger management thread shouldn't work alongside all that. Somehow it does.