Other Doctor Lives: Criminal Record: Season 1, Episode 8 – “Carla” (2024)

*Episode premise spoilers, which include spoilers from episode 7.*

Season finale of Criminal Record! I know that the show has been picked up for another season, and as I’ve been watching, I wasn’t sure how that was going to work—I assumed this season would wrap up the Adelaide Burrows murder case, and I couldn’t really picture how they’d move on from there. Like, would it be more of an anthology show like True Detective? But now that the season is over, I can kind of see how the show could be continued.

In the last episode, June confronted Hegarty about the recording she discovered of him coaching Errol through his false confession. Despite the immoral and illegal tactics he used to close the case, Hegarty is still confident he’s got the right man, and he offers to go through the case records with June to prove it. When that search reveals a glaring hole in the original investigation, Hegarty is just as anxious as June to chase down the leads he missed back then. This becomes even more urgent after someone leaks the recording of the emergency call that started June down this path in the front place—not only is the real murderer still out there somewhere, but now the audio of his girlfriend Carla saying he brags about killing Adelaide is all over the internet. June and Hegarty are forced to work together before the leak costs Carla her life.

That’s right—these two have had each other in their sights all season, and now they’re reluctantly teaming up. It gives June a different perspective on Hegarty and the initial murder investigation. While what he did to Errol is still horrifically gross and unethical, she’s able to see the difference between him and some of his goons, who are more nakedly and enthusiastically racist. Hegarty has huge, unconscionable blind spots that contributed to him dropping the ball in a very consequential way, but he does ultimately want to arrest the right people, not just whoever’s convenient.

So the two of them comb through the evidence and try to find the real killer, racing against time before he punishes Carla for the leak that she had nothing to do with. The situation is urgent enough that both June and Hegarty can compartmentalize and stay focused on the investigation, but neither June nor the show lets Hegarty off the hook for his past actions. In the quieter, less high-stress moments of the episode, June repeatedly takes Hegarty to task: for missing critical evidence the first time around, for coercing Errol’s confession in such an awful way, and for not analyzing why he succumbed to such a perfect storm of corruption in this case in particular.

While I don’t get behind all of the show’s choices here, I think they strike a good balance with Hegarty in the end. Like I’ve said the last few episodes, the show is able to explore the motivations behind his choices without excusing or justifying them, and I’d say that bears out here. And although there are certainly plenty of cops who are openly, grossly racist, like some of the characters we see on this show, it’s a more interesting narrative to me that Hegarty isn’t one of them. That he views himself as a good detective and wouldn’t think of himself as being prejudiced, but that he still does some truly terrible things and goes down an intense road of corruption to cover his ass afterwards. That his biases are one of several reasons behind his actions. And that it ultimately doesn’t matter whether or not he’s done these things because He’s an Evil Racist: whatever his reasons, Errol’s life has been destroyed either way. This is a more interesting, more complex story, and it gives Peter Capaldi more to do than if Hegarty had been characterized more like his cronies.

Accent Watch

Scottish.

Recommend?

In General – Maybe. I don’t think it succeeds in everything it sets out to do, but it has some interesting stuff going for it.

Peter Capaldi – I think I would. Capaldi turns in a strong performance here, and it goes places I didn’t expect at the start of the series.

Warnings

Graphic violence, copaganda, language, drinking/smoking/drug use, and strong thematic elements (including gaslighting and references to suicide.)

Other Doctor Lives: Criminal Record: Season 1, Episode 7 – “The Sixty-Twos” (2024)

*A few spoilers.*

The penultimate episode of Criminal Record is a big one, for both for the series and Peter Capaldi/Hegarty. We go deep in this flashback episode, and Capaldi gives a terrific performance.

June confronts Hegarty, this time armed with some damning evidence that can’t be explained away. At long last, he tells her what really happened during the investigation into Adelaide’s murder.

Aside from a bit of voiceover at the beginning and a concluding present-day scene, the whole episode takes place in the past, following Hegarty as he leads this fateful investigation. What plays out is less an evil cabal conspiracy and more a picture of how a grief-stricken Black man was thrown away as a result of distracted police work and exterior pressure.

The episode takes its time establishing all the circumstances that came together here, what brought Hegarty to push Errol into a false confession. Thanks to recent civil unrest, the top brass is itching to “make an example” out of Adelaide’s killer and clears the path for everything to be fast-tracked. Hegarty’s head isn’t where it should be—this is all happening six months after his wife died by suicide, and his long hours make it even harder for him to be there for his daughter. Throughout the episode, we see his attention drawn from the case by Lisa’s calls and texts, asking when he’s coming home and letting her sadness, anger, and resentment out on him. And when his eyes are off the ball, his misgivings about the case fall further down the list of priorities and his cronies cut corners in his stead.

At different times, we see Hegarty trying to do his actual job, following the investigation where the facts lead instead of cherry-picking facts to fit the convenient suspect. As soon as it’s mentioned that Errol was covered in Adelaide’s blood, he says, “That doesn’t mean he stabbed her, does it? Holding her in his arms.” He side eyes the idea that Errol habitually carries a knife, pointing to police records—“This guy’s been stopped and searched nine times. Nine times. Never once has he been carrying.” When one of his colleagues sneers, “Born liar, that one,” Hegarty responds, “Doesn’t make him a killer.”

But he keeps dropping the ball. Hegarty’s understandably distracted by his troubles at home, he’s not watching to catch what his cronies are missing, and as more pressure comes down to close the case fast, he gets increasingly desperate to bring charges any way he can.

In a really weird way, this story reminds me a little of episode 7 of The Acolyte—all the little things that go wrong, all the small mistakes and misunderstandings that lead up to a huge miscarriage of justice. In this analogy, I’d say Hegarty ends up being kind of a mixture between Sol and Indara.

As with Hegarty’s search for Lisa in episode 6, what’s important here is that it explains his behavior without excusing it. Hegarty’s motivations in this episode aren’t evil, and the struggles he’s dealing with are human and sympathetic. But really? Insert the Toymaker sarcastically shouting, “Well, that’s all right then!” Because yes, Hegarty is distracted by serious, difficult things going on at home. But he’s a detective, and when his personal problems make his police work sloppy, when he lets pressure from above push him into going against his ethics (not to mention the law,) other people pay a massive price for his grief-stricken, stressed-out mistakes. Hegarty shouldn’t have been leading this investigation in the first place, because he’s not fit to be there right now. His work is too consequential, and careless oversight costs lives.

Capaldi really takes us on a journey in this episode. From basically the start of the show, his performance has had me raising my hackles, with good reason. But here, we get a very different picture of Hegarty. We glimpse the kind of integrity he can have as a police officer, we see how he responds when he’s getting squeezed from every direction, and we ultimately witness how his corruption arc probably began. Excellent work from Capaldi all around!

Other Doctor Lives: Criminal Record: Season 1, Episode 5 – “Possession with Intent” (2024)

*Episode premise spoilers.*

With Other Doctor Lives, I typically watch/review stuff a while before I get around to posting it, so I always have something on deck and ready to go up without having to write a brand-new post first. Long story short, it was a few months ago that I was watching Criminal Record, and I watched this episode the day after the election. Even with my notes, things were a bit spotty.

Hegarty’s cronies are escalating their intimidation of June, going so far as to stop-and-frisk her 12-year-old son. In turn, she confronts one of his associates directly. She also tries to dig into the reasoning behind why Errol might have made a false confession.

I’ve learned enough to know that false confessions are a lot more common than people might think. Personally, I think the explanation they use on the show pushes things further than it needs to, but if it’s ultimately what they go with, they have started laying groundwork for it in previous episodes.

The police messing with June’s son Jacob is pretty ugly. Obviously, police don’t really need a reason to harass and scare a 12-year-old Black boy, and the whole situation would be harrowing enough as it is. But doing it specifically as retaliation against June gives it an extra layer of creepiness for me. When Jacob doesn’t turn up for football practice, Leo and June have no idea what happened to him and frantically try to get him on the phone. And June is later disgusted by the realization that her son’s picture and fingerprints are now in the system.

Another interesting aspect of this is seeing a Black mother, who’s also a police officer, try to navigate giving her son the talk. We’ve seen what she’s been going through all season, so she’s obviously not in denial about racist cops, but she’s so careful and hesitant in addressing the subject. In fact, Jacob is the one who prompts her to use the word “racist.”

One intriguing thing about Hegarty is how frustrated he is with the behavior of his cronies. It’s certainly not that he dislikes them trying to scare June off the case. But his approach is much subtler than theirs, and he dresses them down when their efforts are too conspicuous. You get the sense that his underlings are sort of like attack dogs that he can’t fully control: he wants to use them to send a message to June, but things quickly get out of hand and he can’t rein them back in. There’s a bit of an “I’m surrounded by idiots” vibe going on here.

I appreciate that, that Peter Capaldi can play this bad guy without really any mustache twirling. It comes through loud and clear that Hegarty is bad news, but he does it in such a way that he can often intimidate June in plain sight without drawing anyone else’s attention to what he’s doing. Meanwhile, his cronies are loose cannons who repeatedly up the ante, which makes covering their tracks a lot harder.