Right to Silence

Right to Silence is the episode of the middle years with the least plot and the most pressure, and the pressure is almost entirely personal. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan trace two murders to a single suspect and then discover he is already in prison, which is a genuine structural problem — a case that cannot be closed by an arrest, because the person responsible is somewhere the police cannot touch him. An attempted arrest then goes wrong, and the episode's real business begins.

What makes the instalment unusual for the series is how much of it concerns Hill's private life. He has wedding plans, and Jordan is affected by them in a way she does not articulate. The two of them then arrive at the sharpest professional test of the entire Norris era: Hill asks Jordan to perjure herself. This is a much more interesting version of the show's institutional theme than the usual friction with a senior officer, because the pressure is not coming from above. It is coming from the man Jordan has spent three series protecting, and he is asking her to break the law to protect his work.

Jeff Povey, the only writer to contribute a single episode to this series, resists the temptation to resolve it. The request is made, and its consequences are felt, without the show staging a scene in which either of them sets out a position. That restraint is why the episode stays with you despite its thin crime plot; the case is largely a device for getting the two leads into a room where the question cannot be avoided.

The episode is also the one in which Jordan is promoted from Detective Inspector to Detective Chief Inspector, which Wikipedia records as occurring in Right to Silence. It is a change that matters less in this film than in the one that follows, since the promotion is what begins to put her on the side of the institution Hill has always been at odds with.

The weakness is the crime. A suspect in prison is a strong premise that the episode does not really use, and the investigation is resolved quickly for a 90-minute slot. An audience that came for a case will find the mystery underpowered, and the published material on this episode is noticeably thinner than on its neighbours — a limitation of the record rather than an accusation about the writing, but one a reader should know about.

It drew 7.60 million viewers, close to the series high. It is the most character-driven of the 2004 films and the one that sets up the command structure the third series depends on. Whether the perjury request is ever answered is one of the things the show leaves hanging, and it is to the episode's credit that the question does not need settling to have done its damage.