The Fall (2)

The second half turns a bizarre murder case into something more uncomfortable: an inside job. As Boyd closes in on the killer, official corruption starts surfacing around the edges of the inquiry, and the strain lands where it hurts most, between Boyd and Grace Foley. Their working relationship has always carried an undertow, and this episode pulls it into the open at exactly the wrong moment.

There's also a clock ticking. The truth about Lisa Tobin comes out, Declan Keane's death hands the team a new lead, and the race is on to find the murderer before Lisa finds him first. That's a good engine for a finale: the police and their witness both heading for the same man, with only one of them planning to be reasonable about it. Stanley Townsend's DI Bailey gets pulled into holding professional order while the institutional rot spreads, and the show doesn't pretend the two problems are separate.

Trevor Eve and Sue Johnston carry the emotional weight as Boyd and Grace, and they're well matched here; years of unspoken things get aired without either of them turning into a different character. Tara Fitzgerald is Dr Eve Lockhart, Wil Johnson plays DI Spencer Jordan, Félicité Du Jeu is DC Stella Goodman. Terence Harvey appears as Philip White and Peter Capaldi's Lucien Calvin remains one of the better guest turns of the series.

Barbara Machin and Damian Wayling wrote it, Robert Bierman directs again, keeping the corruption material taut rather than theatrical.

What stays with me is how the two halves rhyme. A couple sealed together by a single bullet in 1992 opens the story; a partnership strained to breaking closes it. The show never says that out loud, which is why it works. The Fall ends up being less about who fired the shot than about what institutions do when the shot implicates them. Worth the two hours.