End of the Night (2)

Part two gives the case its first real break. New forensic evidence points the team at Jason Bloch, one of the two men who raped Gemma, and Boyd has enough to arrest him there and then. He chooses not to. Bloch is blackmailing his accomplice, a respected surgeon called James Mitcham who looks after Bloch's invalid wife, and Boyd lets the rope out so the pair can hang themselves. It is a gamble, and it turns the second half into a race, because Gemma has her own ideas about justice and nobody wants her getting there first.

But the moral mud is where this show lives, and this episode is properly in it. Boyd is playing a blackmailer against his victim, using one crime to lever open another, and the calculation stays cold even when the outcome is just. Mitcham is a sympathetic figure caught in a trap of Bloch's making, and the episode makes you feel the weight of that before it lets anyone off.

Barbara Machin and Ed Whitmore wrote it, and Dan Reed directed. 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 Stacey Roca as DS Katrina Howard. Michelle Dockery plays Gemma Morrison, Kate Fleetwood Zoe Morrison, Simon Wilson Andrew, Noah Hedges Shaun Morrison and Ian Mercer Jason Bloch.

The personal stakes lift it above the usual procedural. Gemma is no longer the victim waiting in a file. She is a woman with twelve years of reasons and her own timetable, and every scene she is in carries the possibility that the team's careful plan comes apart. Dockery plays quietly furious better than almost anyone, and she does it again here.

As second halves go, this one earns the first half's patience. The blackmail thread pays off, and the moral questions stay open past the credits. Boyd's decision to wait is the kind of choice that would get a lesser show in trouble. He gets away with it, mostly, and so does the episode.