The Fall (1)

Wrecking crews find bodies. It's almost routine. What a demolition team pulls out of an old City bank in 2007 is not: two desiccated corpses fall through the ceiling, still sexually conjoined, killed in 1992 by a single bullet while they were together. That's the cold open, and it's one of the most striking images the series ever managed.

The Cold Case Squad inherits the tableau, and part one wisely doesn't try to explain it quickly. Two people shot dead mid-act by one bullet is either an act of extraordinary precision or something stranger than that, and the episode lets the team sit with the awkwardness of it. There's comedy in the premise if you want it, but the show plays it straighter than you'd expect, which turns out to be the right call. These were two people who died in the middle of something private, and spent fifteen years sealed inside the fabric of the City before gravity gave them back.

Trevor Eve leads as DSI Peter Boyd, with Sue Johnston's Dr Grace Foley and Wil Johnson's DI Spencer Jordan alongside him, Félicité Du Jeu as DC Stella Goodman and Tara Fitzgerald as Dr Eve Lockhart, who gets the forensic job of making sense of remains nobody has a precedent for. The guest cast is quietly excellent: Terence Harvey as Philip White, Peter Capaldi as Lucien Calvin, Nick Dunning as Declan Keane, Catherine Walker as Lisa Tobin and Stanley Townsend as DI Bailey.

Barbara Machin and Damian Wayling wrote it; Robert Bierman directs with a steadier hand than the material strictly demands.

The pleasure here is watching procedure grind against absurdity. Forensics on conjoined mummies, witness statements about a bank nobody wanted to talk about, 1992 money doing whatever 1992 money was doing. Part one asks its outrageous question properly and leaves the answer behind the ceiling where we found it.