The Dead Land: Part 1

The Dead Land is the penultimate episode of the series and the one that isolates Tony Hill most deliberately. Someone is murdering homeless men in Bradfield in a ritualistic fashion: feeding them, bathing them, wrapping the bodies in paper and salt, stabbing them through the heart and depositing them around the financial district. It is the most carefully researched method in the run and the one whose meaning takes longest to surface.

The film's structural device is a change of command. Alex Fielding is called away to her mother's funeral and replaced by a fast-tracked senior investigating officer with a psychology degree from Oxbridge, and Hill resents him before he has done anything. DI Andy Hall, played by John Hopkins, is then good at the job, and Hill's grudging reassessment is the episode's most interesting character work: the show had spent six series establishing that Hill is dismissed by people who outrank him, and here he does the same thing to someone else for no better reason than that the man is young and confident.

The two of them agree that the careful treatment of the bodies indicates ritual, and Hill makes the connection over dinner at a sushi restaurant: the practice has a Japanese funerary inspiration. An unusual witness then posthumously leads the team to a suspect who appears to fit the killer's profile completely, and a final twist reveals the true identity. The published record does not name the offender, and this dossier has not filled that gap.

The episode's subject is the treatment of the dead. A killer who washes, feeds and wraps his victims before killing them is showing a regard that society withheld while they were alive, and the fact that the bodies are dumped in the financial district — the one part of the city with money in it — is not accidental. Alan Whiting's script is at its strongest when it is making that argument through staging rather than statement, and the sushi-restaurant scene, though it arrives through coincidence, gives the episode the only piece of interpretation in it that a viewer can watch Hill perform.

The other thread is Michael. Hill becomes aware that someone is stalking him, suspects the escaped psychiatrist, is placed under police protection and refuses to stop working. The film is careful to keep his peril administrative rather than dramatic for as long as possible — being under protection is boring and impedes the case — which makes the violence that follows land harder than an obvious threat would.

It drew 5.10 million viewers and is rated 7.7. Two limitations: the sushi connection is a coincidence rather than a deduction, and the final twist is achieved at the cost of the earlier suspect being thoroughly established for no return. The episode remains the best-constructed of the final four stories and the strongest case the show made in its last year for the value of Hill's mind.