From the Defeated: Part 1

From the Defeated is the most intricate plot of the final series and the one most dependent on its mechanics. Tony Hill is brought in to investigate a series of kidnappings and murders in which the victims appear to have been killers themselves. The first body, a young man, was beaten, strangled and shot in the head, and the question of why three methods were necessary is the film's opening riddle.

The answer, once a second victim is found linked to the first only by skin beneath his fingernails, is that the two men had no connection except in death. One killed the other. The person who killed the survivor is the offender, and as more victims emerge Hill assembles a chain of attacks in which killer becomes victim, a survival-of-the-fittest sequence made literal. The gun involved in each case belongs to the same person — an illegal dogfight promoter who claims it was stolen — and the question of whether he has moved from dogs to men runs through the investigation.

Running alongside the case is a stalker. A young single mother living in a remote cottage has complained to her local police and been dismissed, and only Hill realises that she is related to the other victims and will play the final part in the offender's plan. That thread is the episode's best piece of construction: the woman nobody will listen to turns out to be the hinge of the whole thing, and the show makes the failure of local policing the reason she is in danger.

The second strand, and the one that defines the series, is Michael. The cannibal psychiatrist whom Hill helped convict in the opening story escapes from prison by murdering the chaplain, suffocating him with the pages of his own Bible, and then disguising himself in the chaplain's clothes. A Bible passage is pinned to Hill's windscreen and Michael telephones him; his worst fears are confirmed.

Simon Block's script is the most ambitious plotting of the run and it does not entirely hold. The chain-killing structure is genuinely novel, but the film is rated 7.5 — the lowest of the four two-parters — and drew 5.07 million, and the reason is that the intelligence of the premise is not matched by the clarity of its execution. An audience watching week to week has to hold a promoter, a stolen gun, a stalked woman and a prison escape in mind at once, and the episode's attempts to keep them all alive result in a middle section that moves more than it reveals.

What lands is the imagery. The Bible-page suffocation and the stolen cassock are the most deliberately sacrilegious staging the series produced, and they work because they are tied to Michael's specific pathology rather than used for atmosphere. The episode is also the point at which the series' final stretch becomes a pursuit, and it makes that transition credibly.