Justice Painted Blind: Part 2

The conclusion of Justice Painted Blind confirms what the first part suspected: the killer believes he is administering justice. Two unsolved paedophile crimes sit behind the case, and the episode is frank about how much they disgust the investigating officers, which is the show's way of declining to make the avenger sympathetic simply because his targets are monstrous. Hill and Jordan have to solve the old crimes in order to stop the new ones, and the fact that they succeed does not make the earlier failures of the system go away.

The episode is the series' first full statement of a theme it returns to throughout its run: the murderer who has reasons. Over the next six years Bradfield would produce killers motivated by mercy, by loyalty, by love and by a belief in their own righteousness, and Justice Painted Blind is where that pattern starts. It is a more interesting position than the genre's default, and it is also a riskier one, because a story about a killer with a mission has to be careful not to argue his case for him. The episode manages this mostly by keeping the victims' families in view.

Spencer, Jordan's lawyer boyfriend, returns from the first part with his own theory of who is responsible, and his involvement does two things at once. It introduces an outside explanation of the crimes that turns out to be inadequate, and it keeps a third person in a partnership that the show is otherwise content to leave as two. Toward the end of the series' first run, this is the closest the show comes to putting a questioning presence alongside Hill and Jordan rather than in opposition to them.

The part drew 7.18 million viewers and closed a series that had taken the Royal Television Society's Best Network Production award. What it demonstrates, in retrospect, is how much of the series' shape was decided in its first three stories: the profiler whose understanding is dangerous, the detective who shields him, the institution that distrusts both, and the killer whose motive is legible. Every one of those elements is present here in finished form.

The weakness is a structural one that the two-part format imposes. The first half has to withhold the mission; the second half has to explain and close it inside an hour, and the difference in pace is noticeable. The episode's final movement is efficient rather than satisfying.

The published summaries do not describe the television resolution in the detail the rest of this dossier is able to offer for the novels, and no detail has been supplied here that the record does not support. What can be said is that the show arrives at its answer and states it, which is more than can be claimed for several of the episodes that followed. It is a fitting end to a first series that established, in six parts, almost everything the show would go on doing.