Sharp Compassion

Someone is killing hospital patients in Bradfield, and the episode's opening act suggests a domestic murder before revealing something much worse. Carol Jordan's investigation takes its darker turn when a victim who had been recovering well in hospital is found murdered. As a precaution she orders post-mortems on other patients who had died there of natural causes, and discovers she has considerably more murder on her hands than she anticipated. It is the best opening move in the 2004 series: the discovery that a death was always a crime arrives through routine procedure rather than insight.

Hill's reading is that the killer may believe he is healing his victims, and that the deaths are motivated by a religious conviction rather than a compulsion. The idea of a compulsory-euthanasia killer is not a comfortable one, and the episode leans into that discomfort by giving it to the families. The investigations then yield more suspects rather than narrowing the search, because the hospital's internal structure — the hierarchy, the rivalries, the people who know things about each other — is the actual terrain.

The film is the series at its most institutional, and it uses three separate structures to obstruct Jordan at once. There is the hospital, which conceals. There is MI5, which arrives when Islamic terrorism becomes one of the lines of inquiry and adds a layer of command that has to be satisfied rather than useful. And there is the police's own promotion contest, with Merrick and Geoffries competing for Jordan's old job of DI, which means the two people she would ordinarily rely on are busy manoeuvring against each other. When John Brandon suffers a heart attack and nearly becomes a victim of the killer himself, Jordan loses her only political protection at the moment she most needs it.

That last development is the episode's most consequential. Tom Chadbon's Brandon had been the fixed point of the command structure since the first episode, and his removal changes the shape of the show. From the next series Jordan is dealing with ACC Paul Eden, who views Hill's methods with suspicion, and the argument about whether the psychologist belongs in the building is no longer settled in his favour.

The weakness is the MI5 strand, which is raised as a serious complication and then largely set aside once the medical case develops. It functions as noise, and an audience paying attention will notice the promise is not kept.

The episode drew 6.00 million viewers and closed a series that led its slot throughout. It is also the last episode of the Norris and Chadbon configuration, and it ends on a note the show would return to often: the killer who thinks he is being kind, and the police who cannot afford to agree with him.