Still She Cries

Wire in the Blood returned eighteen months after its first series with longer episodes, a promotion for its female lead and a new problem for its psychologist. Still She Cries opens with Tony Hill asking the police to reopen the case of Maggie Thomas, his long-standing patient and a convicted child killer, in the hope of recovering the children's bodies so their families can bury them. It is a decent instinct and a professional mistake, because the person who pays for it is Maggie.

Hill cannot manage the case alone, so he brings in one of his students, the bright and confident Laura Webster, to help her understand the work. Carol Jordan — now a DCI following her promotion — is unhappy about it. Laura's abilities are then tested in a way nobody intends, when her best friend Hattie is abducted, and the access Hill gave her to the Maggie Thomas material turns out to be access to a live investigation as well. Hill ends up caught between Jordan and Laura, and in the middle of that triangle he leaves Maggie Thomas alone and unregarded.

The episode's achievement is to make Maggie the subject rather than the plot device she was in the first series. Elaine Claxton had appeared in 2002 only as the patient Hill visits between cases. Here she is a woman who has been used as a resource, has understood that she is being used, and eventually decides she has had enough of not being taken seriously — at which point Jordan has another victim to deal with, and the tragedy is entirely of the investigators' making. It is a much harder and better episode than its kidnapping plot suggests.

Emma Handy arrives as DC Paula McIntyre, who Wikipedia records as the replacement for Annie Reiss and who would remain with the series to the end. She makes very little impression here, which is the point: the character is introduced as a competent member of a team rather than as a personality, and the show builds her over the next six years.

Where the episode overreaches is in the triangle. Hill's failure to manage either woman's expectations is dramatised at a level of signposting the material does not need, and the Laura strand in particular is written so that her function is obvious well before it is revealed. Amber Batty plays her as someone more capable than the men around her assume, which helps, but the script has already decided what she is for.

The episode drew 5.50 million viewers, down from the first series' figures, though it led its slot. It is the strongest of the four 2004 films and the one that does most to establish what the middle years of the show would be about: Hill's work damaging the people who come into contact with it, and the show being honest enough to say so.