Black Run (2)

Boyd's bad week gets worse. Someone stages a hit-and-run with him behind the wheel, possibly under the influence, and the force does what forces do: suspends him first, asks questions later. The framing is the point, of course. Whoever arranged it knows exactly how a man like Boyd looks when he's standing in the dock of his own profession.

So the squad works two cases at once. There's the official one, which is Boyd himself: who set this up, and why now. And there's Eddie Vine, still dying, still the question the whole business started from. Is Vine innocent after eight years inside for killing his friend Tom Pallisser, or is his illness just another card being played? The team keeps digging on both fronts even with their boss officially barred from the building, because nobody here has ever much cared where the tape goes.

It's a good setup, and the episode uses it well. Boyd stripped of rank is still Boyd, jaw first, and watching Sue Johnston's Grace Foley hold the fort while he simmers gives the ensemble its best material in a while. The show has always understood that its real subject isn't murders but institutions, and what it costs the people inside them.

Raymond Khoury and Barbara Machin wrote it, Ben Bolt directed, shown the night after part one in September 2005. Trevor Eve leads as Det Supt Peter Boyd, with Sue Johnston as Dr Grace Foley, Wil Johnson as DI Spencer Jordan, Esther Hall as Dr Felix Gibson and Félicité Du Jeu as DC Stella Goodman. David Hayman returns as Eddie Vine, alongside Diane Parish as Sheryl Palliser, Connor McIntyre as DI Stan Gulley, Peter Polycarpou as Dominic Parks and Geff Francis as Dr Donald McNeill.

The answer to who framed Boyd turns out to be tangled up with the answer to what happened to Pallisser, which is satisfying without being neat. Eight years of somebody's lie finally come apart. It took a scandal to manage it.