Falls the Shadow: Part 2

The conclusion of Falls the Shadow brings Hill out of a cell and into a confrontation, and the confrontation is the point. His insight leads Fielding and the team to the offender, but he insists on meeting the killer himself, and the episode closes on the question of whether he will survive it. The production's own synopsis poses that as an open question, which tells you what kind of ending this is: not a solution but a reckoning.

What the second part resolves is the identification of the single hand behind both the prostitute murders and the killings of the experimental psychologists. The relationship the first part established — that the two sets of crimes are one case, and that the motive connects professional practice with something more personal — is confirmed. The published record does not name the offender in terms a reader could use, and this dossier has not filled that gap.

The film's interest is in the shape of the ending rather than its content. Hill has spent six series arguing that understanding an offender requires entering their frame of reference, and he has been repeatedly damaged by it: targeted in 2002, jailed here, stalked in the two stories that follow. Confronting the killer alone is the fullest expression of a method whose cost the show had been counting since the first episode, and the choice to leave his survival in doubt is a fair use of a two-part structure.

What the pair does less successfully is distribute its material. The first part carries the arrest, the second carries the confrontation, and the interval between them is thinner than a nine-hour series ought to allow. The film is rated 7.9, the same as its first half, and drew 5.18 million viewers, slightly up on the earlier part.

There is also a cast-list anomaly in the credited material for this part: nine credited performers against ten in every other episode of the run, which may indicate a missing credit rather than a smaller cast. That is a limitation of the record, not a claim about the production.

The broader significance of the pair is that it closes the series' relationship with its source. McDermid's novels had supplied four of the thirty-one transmitted parts, and Falls the Shadow was the last of them. That the final adaptation should be an episode in which the profiler is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit is a fitting note: the books gave the show its detective, and the show's last use of them put him where the books' author had always been most interested — inside the machinery of suspicion rather than outside it.