UK Edition
Review
Talk about cliffhangers – has Unforgotten taken it a step too far? Season 4 episode 5, review
There's no Line of Duty-style browbeating with Unforgotten, but has this emotional show taken a huge risk in its penultimate episode?
All throughout this fourth series, we’ve praised Unforgotten (ITV) for its determinedly steady pace, with the crime drama refusing to indulge in anything overly dramatic. But now, ahead of next week’s finale, Chris Lang has given us a cliffhanger. DCI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) has been in a car accident, which could potentially result in her imminent bumping off.
The question, of course, is whether Chris Lang’s hit procedural would still be worth watching without its superhumanly organised and even more superhumanly grumpy heroine. Or might Unforgotten instantly become forgettable?
The other pressing matter is whether Cassie was the victim of a random collision. Or had someone crashed into her by design? The ambivalence was left dangling by Lang, who cut between Cassie (waiting for a call from her estranged dad) and the four suspects in her latest cold case.
All were driving at night, looking by turns miffed, upset and furious. The fury was largely courtesy of cranky copper Ram Sidhu (Phaldut Sharma). Given his key part in the killing 30 years previously of tattooed lout Matthew Walsh, Ram was starting to believe the end might be nigh. Had he taken matters into his own hands and sought revenge against Cassie?
It is possibly that we are overthinking things. But then that says a lot for how Unforgotten gets under the skin of the viewer. Where busier shows – Line of Duty for instance – try to browbeat you by being “clever” (i.e. hard to follow) Lang engages with the audience at a largely emotional level.
There was certainly lots of emotion in this penultimate instalment, which set the scene for a nail-biting finale next week. Even as the story took shape, the quartet linked to Walsh’s death were losing the plot, some more spectacularly than others.
With the noose tightening, Ram had already told his wife that being connected to Walsh could spell curtains for his police career. Meanwhile, Fiona Grayson (Liz White) had crumbled and confessed to her children her secret life as an alcoholic ex-cop who had killed a child in a drink-driving incident. Or at least she was in the middle of doing so, when the police charged in and hauled her off for questioning.
Also pulled in was Liz Baildon (Susan Lynch), in the process of being installed as new Chief Constable for East Anglia. That promotion was suddenly very much off the cards as she locked horns with Cassie and Sunny (Sanjeev Bhaskar).
Liz was determined to conceal the truth no matter what. That was in contrast to Fiona, who fell to pieces and gave her account of the events leading up to Walsh’s death in 1990.
We already knew Walsh was a monster who sexually assaulted Fiona when she was on an evening out with her friends from police college. Ram, a fellow recruit, had come to her aid and received a beating for his troubles.
He more than had his revenge on that fateful graduation night, however, as he and the recently deceased Rob Fogerty – who had stashed Walsh’s body in his fridge for 30 years – chased Walsh across the green. Breaking down, Fiona described catching up with her classmates and seeing Ram administer CPR to the already dead Walsh. It was an “accident” she had been told. And she believed it.
Amid the car crashes and the confessions, Lang took time to further flesh out his characters’s backgrounds. Dean Barton (Andy Nyman), the last of the four, had changed his name to conceal that he was the scion of a crime family that cut him off when he joined the police. His mother, now dying, was desperate to meet the son she hadn’t seen in 30 years.
Domestic woes similarly afflicted Cassie. Her row with her father (Peter Egan) about his will had turned nasty as she arrived on his doorstep and confronted his new girlfriend Jen (Cassie believes she is manipulating him). Her father had refused to take her calls after that – one reason she was distracted when the other car smacked into her.
And with that, Unforgotten has become a very different show. The focus in no longer the cold case but the red hot matter of Cassie’s survival. It was a neat sleight of hand. But it is also a huge risk for a series that owes much of its appeal to Walker’s turbo-charged flintiness. Is there life for Unforgotten after Cassie? Will she make a spectacular recovery? All will presumably be revealed seven days from now.
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