REVIEW: Innocent, Series 1 Episode Four

 REVIEW: Innocent, Series 1 Episode Four

If the first series of Innocent seems to show anything, it's that sometimes even the police don't hold the answers. They wrongly arrested David Collins (Lee Ingleby) for the murder of his wife, after all, and the previous three episodes have made them seem none-the-wiser as to who the real culprit may be. We expect the law to find the people responsible for these crimes, but this series poses the question of what happens if the law fails to deliver on that trust.

Trust is a key theme of Innocent's first series. Even David betrays it with his kids Jack (Fionn O'Shea) and Rosie (Eloise Webb), when they discover he sold his story regarding being falsely blamed for Tara's murder to the papers. It's great that David is challenged over this, because what he did was kind of in bad taste. Whilst it's understandable that he did it because he was desperate for the money, David never really took into consideration how his kids would feel. It's their mother, and they have every right to not want their mother's murder abused for publicity. Especially as it goes into her affair with Tom Wilson (Elliot Cowan), which is the kind of thing no kid would want the world knowing about their mother. 

To be fair David does later try to do something about it, even if his actions wouldn't make much difference in the grand scheme of things. He's spotted trying to buy an entire batch of the papers from the newsagent's by former Detective Inspector on the case William Beech (Nigel Lindsay), and this DI just doesn't stop appearing totally unlikeable. He has the nerve to start goading David about the tabloid story, and insisting that he knows David killed his wife. He serves a good narrative purpose of effectively being a thorn in the side for our protagonist, somebody who continues to make life hard for David and who is determined to remind him what he previously stood accused of. 

As the series enters its final episode, it becomes abundantly clear that Tara was not a nice person. When her sister Alice (Hermione Norris) is interrogated, we discover that she wanted the money for the IVF treatment paid back, and was prepared to let her own sibling sell her flat - which would have rendered her homeless - in order to raise the financial sum. Tara sounds as though she was absolutely detestable, and it's a strong way of showing us exactly why anybody would want to murder her. She's someone who clearly rubbed people up the wrong way, so we can understand why she became a murder victim, even if we would never dream of committing such a horrendous act ourselves. 

The biggest victims in all this are Jack and Rosie though, and this episode is really good at showing how confused this situation has left them. They're angry at Alice, they want to know why she claimed their Dad was violent in court when he didn't commit the murder, and they want answers. It's a believable reaction to an impossible situation. This kind of scenario is something that would leave kids asking all manners of questions, and play havoc with their minds in terms of who to trust. Suddenly it's not just strangers to be wary of, it's your own family too.

One person you certainly wouldn't trust is Tom. He's awful to his wife Melissa (Hannah Britland), who he cheated on with Tara, and it makes it so satisfying when he's later suspended from the doctor's surgery. It's poetic justice for sure, as women deserve to be treated far better than in the kind of demeaning way Tom seems to view them. 

Of course, as this is the last episode of the first series, it's here that we get to find out the identity of Tara's killer, and the reveal is one that I did not see coming. David's brother Phil (Daniel Ryan) is the last person I expected, and yet when it's revealed it makes so much sense. It explains how over-protective he is over his brother, his funny attitude towards Cathy (Angel Coulby) (who, it turns out, he took pictures of with David in order to paint them as having an affair to her boss), and why he was the one character who seemed so certain of David's innocence. Before this episode I just assumed all of this was because of their familial connection as brothers, but in hindsight the clues were all there, and it's such a brilliant rug pull to have us miss what was under our noses the entire time.

Overall, Innocent's fourth episode is an amazing conclusion to the first series. It's a finale that never loses its focus on character, whilst also presenting plenty of shocking twists and turns along the way. Innocent's first series was a great success for ITV, and after this first run of the mystery drama show I'm certainly keen to check out the second series on ITV Hub.

What are your thoughts on Innocent's fourth episode? Let me know in the comments section.