Wounded Surgeon

Wounded Surgeon takes the show's recurring anxiety about its own protagonist and makes it the entire subject. Tony Hill's first case with the police comes back to haunt him when Jason Eglee, convicted of murder on Hill's evidence, comes up for parole. Eglee appears to be a reformed man after years of prison therapy. Hill is not convinced, and manages to sway the board against release — until Eglee's mother attacks him in the hearing and then collapses and dies.

That sequence is the episode's hinge. Hill is not merely wrong afterwards; he is wrong in a way that the public can see, and the press makes him the story. Eglee is released as a compassionate gesture. A girl is then murdered in the same circumstances as Eglee's original victim, and Hill is certain Eglee has started again — until Eglee provides a cast-iron alibi and, crucially, is found to be innocent of the original crime as well. The crime-scene DNA from the case he served time for does not match his.

That is the most corrosive result in the series. Eglee did not do the killing he was imprisoned for, and he did not do the killing he is now suspected of. The conviction built on Hill's profile was wrong from the beginning, and the man's years inside cannot be returned. Hill's confidence collapses, the press hounds him for an exposé, and Fielding decides she can no longer permit him to work for the police. It is the strongest test of their relationship in the Lahbib era, because she is not protecting him from an institution — she is making the institution's decision.

What lifts the film above its premise is that Hill is not finished. Not everyone has lost faith in him, his acuity has not deserted him, and as the murderer prepares to take another victim he realises who they are and why. The show allows him the answer while refusing him the absolution, which is the correct balance: a profile is a hypothesis, and a hypothesis can be catastrophically wrong while the person who made it remains the best available mind.

The episode's weakness is its position in the schedule. It drew 5.43 million viewers, the lowest figure recorded for the series, and it is less discussed than its neighbours in the fourth series. That is unfair to a script that does more with its material than most, but it is also a consequence of following the two strongest films in the run and asking the audience to watch its hero be humiliated for an hour.

Patrick Harbinson, who wrote the series opener, wrote this as well, and the two films are deliberate companions: Time to Murder and Create begins with an old conviction collapsing, and this one ends with the realisation that it should have collapsed. Together they make the fourth series the most self-critical stretch of the show's six.