Prayer of the Bone

Prayer of the Bone takes Tony Hill out of Bradfield and out of the country, and the experiment is more interesting than its reputation suggests. Hill travels to Texas to assist a local district attorney in the case of Darius Grady, accused of murdering his wife and two children. Grady is not a stranger: Hill met him years earlier when Grady was stationed at a US military base near Bradfield and was charged with the rape of a local fifteen-year-old. The military sent him home before he could be prosecuted in Britain.

The defence Grady is running is the same one he used then. He claims post-traumatic stress disorder from his service in Iraq, and the episode's central finding is double-edged: Hill does not believe Grady is suffering from PTSD, but he also finds far too many holes in the prosecution's case to think him guilty. Those two conclusions are not contradictory, and the film is about the distance between them. A man can be a rapist, a liar and possibly a killer and still not be guilty of the specific murders he is charged with, and the show is unusually clear that a court is not an instrument for sorting people into good and bad.

Isolating Hill from the Bradfield ensemble is the film's real experiment. There is no Fielding, no McIntyre, no Geoffries, no Dr Vernon — the credited cast is entirely new — and the character has to hold a feature-length episode against unfamiliar actors in an unfamiliar legal system. Robson Green's performance is the least supported of the run, and the show uses the setting to make Hill's method foreign rather than authoritative: here he has to explain what he does and defend why it should matter.

What the transplant costs is the texture that made the series distinctive. The Bradfield films work because Hill's eccentricity is measured against a team that has learned to tolerate it, and without that counterweight the character's mannerisms have nothing to push against. The Texas supporting cast is efficient and largely unmemorable, and the episode's length is not fully earned by the people it fills that length with.

The film's standing is unusual in several ways. It was shot in and around Austin and La Grange in Texas, the only episode produced outside the UK. It won Patrick Harbinson the 2009 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Television Episode Teleplay — the series' third Edgar and its last. And its placement is genuinely disputed: Wikipedia treats it as the fifth and final episode of the fifth series, the IMDb data numbers it as series six, episode zero, and TheTVDB lists it as a special outside both runs. It transmitted on a Monday in January 2008, between the fifth and sixth series, which is why the disagreement exists.

It drew 6.66 million viewers, a good figure for a January Monday, and it is rated 7.1 by IMDb users — the lowest of the final run's records. The DVD releases of the fifth and sixth series omitted it, which drew criticism at the time and remains the easiest way to miss it. As a stand-alone piece it is a competent legal drama with an unusual lead; as an episode of this series it is the one that shows how much of the show's strength was in its supporting cast.