Nothing But the Night

Nothing But the Night is the episode where the show's method fails, and it is a more honest piece of television than its reputation suggests. A woman is beaten to death with a steam iron, which brings Tony Hill back from a publicity tour for his latest book to join Carol Jordan's investigation. Further deaths follow, and each one is committed so differently from the last that constructing a profile of a single offender becomes impossible.

Hill's difficulty is the episode's engine. The variation in method suggests to the profiling process that each killing was done by someone different, and the offender's psychology — violent and childlike by turns — reads as schizophrenic. Hill is bewildered for most of the running time, which is rare: the show normally allows him at least one insight to carry the audience, and here it withholds them. A series built on the claim that behaviour can be read has to test that claim eventually, and this is the first time it does.

The episode's other business is a triangle. Hill has attracted the unwanted attention of Patricia, a Canadian woman he met on the book tour, and finds himself caught between her and Jordan. Meanwhile Jordan is in York for a case review with her unsympathetic new boss Eden, which is the series' only significant use of York as a setting and another reminder that Peter Sullivan's ACC is now the obstacle Hill used to be able to rely on Jordan to remove.

The resolution turns on relationships rather than methods. Hill works out that the killings reflect a triangle forged in repression and juvenile abuse, and that the offender is turning on his longest-standing victim — the person he ought to love. That is a more interesting conclusion than a name, and it suits an episode about the failure of taxonomy. The show's weakness here is that the multiple-killer premise risks incoherence, and the published material on the ending is general rather than specific.

Sara Stewart's Patricia is the third party who forces the Hill–Jordan question without resolving it, and the episode is unusual in showing Hill as professionally and personally compromised at the same time. His behaviour on the publicity tour is poor. His judgement is patchy. He is, for once, the least reliable person in the investigation, and it is to the show's credit that it does not restore him with a late flourish.

Where the film falls down is in the plotting, which is dense enough that the audience may lose track of which death belongs to which theory. The steam iron, the variety of methods, the abuse history and the suitor all need to pay off, and an hour is tight for all four. It drew 7.70 million viewers, one of the series' strongest figures, and it is the most interesting failure in the first three series — an episode that asks what happens when the profiler cannot profile, and declines to rescue him.