*Episode premise spoilers.*
We’re at the halfway point in the series, continuing the new case from episode 3 in addition to June’s ongoing secret investigation. Some clever detective work and good tension here, along with interesting new layers for Peter Capaldi’s Hegarty.
The suspected shooter from last week’s case has been apprehended, and he’s even confessed, but Hegarty doesn’t buy it. While he digs deeper to find out if the real shooter is still at large, a conversation with a possible informant leads June to a breakthrough in her Adelaide Burrowes investigation.
It’s nice to see June’s official work on the gang shooting case dovetail into her off-the-books investigation. In this case, she’s canvassing the neighborhood for information, and an informant’s comment about the spelling of his name gives her the epiphany she might need to track down Errol Mathis’s missing alibi. It’s not really a House-like random lightbulb moment, though—instead, it highlights a blind spot that she, and a lot of other officers, have about a particular community, and once she’s wise to it, she still has to do a lot of leg work in her resulting search.
There’s a moment where Caldwell refers to June as “[Hegarty’s] pal Meghan Markle,” which is both ridiculous unsubtle and creepily effective. I swear my blood pressure went up when he said it. The racist jokes and insinuations don’t stop coming, and we see other ways Hegarty’s cronies are trying to intimidate/harass June away from her investigation, both professionally and personally.
I should mention that Jason, the shooting suspect in custody, is played by Francis Lovehall. I first saw him in the spectacular National Theatre Live recording of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where he was adorably fun as Robin Starveling. He does a great job here, sharing multiple scenes in the interrogation room with Capaldi.
As I said, this is an interesting episode for Hegarty. Given the premise of the show, it’s intriguing to see him in a situation where he has another young Black man in custody who’s confessed to a crime, but this time, he doesn’t believe it. He thinks Jason is covering for someone else and is determined to find out who. I think it’s important to show that his goal, at least ostensibly, is to stop criminals. He’s definitely shady and has clear biases, and he’s using his power to punish June for daring to dig into this past case, but at least here, his mindset isn’t “I just need to lock somebody up—any Black person will do.”
Which isn’t to say that his actions aren’t extremely messed up here. He has this uncomfortable power play with June where he badgers her about Jason’s confession in front of the task force, testing her to see if she believes it. When Jason isn’t forthcoming about who he’s working with, Hegarty goes to extreme lengths to try and convince him to talk. And I’m interested in his line of questioning for Jason when an anonymous tip says the shooter was white. Immediately, he asks, “Albanian? Turkish?” Now, maybe those particular gangs are active in that part of London, but it stood out to me that his automatic assumption was a white or SWANA immigrant, not a white British guy.
There’s also an unsettling plot involving Hegarty and Adelaide’s son Patrick. Errol was Adelaide’s boyfriend at the time of the murder, and Patrick had been in the other room. Hegarty’s cronies have been sort of “looking for” for Patrick, turning a blind eye when he’s gotten into trouble, but Hegarty takes things further here. On one level, it makes sense that someone whose mom was murdered when he was little would feel attached to the guy who put her killer away, but when the “killer’s” guilt is severely in question, it gets way dicier. In this episode, when Patrick comes to him in distress, Hegarty calmly asks, “Do you want me to walk you back through it?” As he talks Patrick through the events of the investigation, it feels like Hegarty reinforcing the narrative he wants Patrick to believe. Yikes!
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