Essentially, I’ve forgotten what the point is. And so, it seems, has everyone in the story. Only SIO Stallwood seems to be remotely interested in getting to the bottom of why the collision happened. Tolin’s gone off on a tangential investigation about Karen and the danger she got into with the two men who escorted her from hospital, leading to her apparent suicide or murder. But in the course of him going off on a tangent he actually went off on a tangent, getting all worried about his daughter Jodie (Jo Woodcock) going away to Edinburgh University. I mean, there was a whole scene in which father and daughter cosied up on a sofa with glasses of wine and chatted about the open day. Excuse me, Inspector! Back to the issue in hand, please! Hello? Collision! And, actually, their ‘collision’ has very little to do with the car crash. Since Jane works in a service station, she obviously ‘collides’ with people every day and it’s not outside the realms of possibility that Richard would have stopped off for a coffee and a chicken salad and a toilet break during his journey on the A12 anyway; he didn’t require an injury to bring him into Jane’s world. So that’s failed. Other collisions? Well, there’s Tolin and Karen, but that’s not really very surprising either, because he’s a police inspector and she’s a victim of a car crash, and a dodgy person in the first place, involved in all sorts of underhand dealings that Tolin wants to investigate. As for Tolin and Stallwood; well, just because they’ve been thrown into a case together doesn’t mean they’ve really collided in any meaningful way, because they already have a history. The moment that rescued this episode was when the camera suddenly panned to a bathroom floor, then a pool of blood, then a bath containing the dead body of Karen. There’s obviously much about this ‘suicide’ that Tolin will be investigating over the final two episodes. But, to reiterate, this is not the case at the heart of the drama. Anne Stallwood needs to bang everybody over the head and get them back on the collision case. Although… I’ve forgotten what we’re aiming to find out from that, too. Read our review of episode two here.
