Wounds (2)

Part two opens the wound all the way. The team's digging connects Chris Dearden's death to a death from 1995 and to more deaths since, and the common thread is a ritual: a Navajo sweat lodge attended by every principal in the case. It is an odd thing to find at the centre of a British cold case, and the episode leans into the oddness without apologising for it.

A sweat lodge is meant to purify. In the hands of this group it becomes the place where everything afterwards started, and the story treats the killings as symptoms of a shared wound the survivors have carried for years. The procedural detail fades beside the aftermath. The show is less interested in how they died than in what the lodge did to them while they were alive.

Barbara Machin and Paul Farrell wrote it, with Sam Miller directing. Trevor Eve leads as DSI Peter Boyd, with Sue Johnston as Dr Grace Foley, Tara Fitzgerald as Dr Eve Lockhart, Wil Johnson as DI Spencer Jordan and Félicité Du Jeu as DC Stella Goodman. George Rainsford plays Luke Boyd, Lorcan Cranitch Victor Coleridge, Ian Puleston-Davies Harold Bloom, Ian Dunn Chris Dearden and Christopher Fulford Josh Findlay.

The structure earns its keep. The first half dealt with the weekend itself. This half gets to show what the weekend set in motion, giving the survivors room to fall apart properly, and the pacing lets that happen without rushing anyone.

Not every gamble pays off this cleanly. The sweat lodge could easily have been silly, and the writers keep it sombre and strange. But that restraint is what makes the pair work, and it leaves part two feeling like a proper conclusion, not a twist for its own sake. The show trusts its audience to sit with a strange idea, and that trust is usually repaid.