Summary
Criminal Record Season 2 continues to excel in its grounded, morally complex approach to the typical police procedural format, with “Firestarters” offering a couple of truly stand-out suspense sequences.
It’s a testament to how well-made Criminal Record is that Episode 2 of Season 2, “Firestarters”, works at all. Not a great deal happens in it, certainly little that we couldn’t have predicted might happen after the premiere. But the small-scale intimacy of the hour is somehow nail-bitingly tense all the same, an impressive exercise in how to build intrigue and suspense solely through character dynamics and good craft.
This was obvious, to be fair, because the Suffolk Square incident worked on several of the same underlying principles. But it’s nice to see that the quality is consistent. There’s a late sequence here that is bracingly good telly, better even than that riot scene, and if we’re going to get one of those kinds of sequences in every episode, then I’ll be more than pleased.
Much of the action here revolves around Billy. After dragging JP from the canal, Hegarty confirms they do know each other but keeps Billy out of the way until he can rope June into the situation. And it’s about as we predicted. Hegarty wants to run Billy as an asset to infiltrate the far-right organisation of Cosmo Thompson, a connected extremist who may have stolen several military-grade detonators, which means several large-scale domestic terror plots might well be underway. June remains primarily interested in who stabbed Rohaan to death, but it’s hard to deny that whatever Cosmo is up to might be a particularly big deal.
This creates another crisis for June, one of several that she’s in the middle of. She doesn’t love working with Hegarty but knows he’s probably the best chance she has of finding Rohaan’s killer. She wants to prioritize Rohaan’s case but knows that a wide-scale domestic terror plot might be more pressing. She’s sceptical about running Billy as an asset, especially since he’s trying to bargain for a clean slate, and that’d mean him not serving his time for killing Cerys. And amid all this, her son wants to move in with his dad.
JP, who survives the canal incident, becomes an unlikely ally. He was also present at Suffolk Square and delayed the tactical support, which felt like the right decision at the time, so he feels at least partially responsible for Rohaan’s death. He and June make a nice pairing, and a surprisingly light one, given the grim-dark, ripped-from-the-headlines context elsewhere.
With all this, it’s easy to forget that June and Hegarty aren’t exactly allies. Criminal Record Season 2, Episode 2 does work to remind us of this now and again, mostly by playing up Hegarty’s general untrustworthiness and lack of affection for protocol, but ironically it’s in the bureaucratic processes that “Firestarters” wrings its most effective tension. The difficulty of life-and-death decision-making is played up for all it’s worth, particularly when Hegarty and June are trying to convince their boss to authorize the use of Billy as an asset. Does he represent a threat to the public? Does the information he can potentially provide outweigh the need for him to pay for the crime he already committed? Hegarty believes so, but when you hear the questions asked directly, you realise how morally murky this show really is. There are no easy answers, just a balance of probabilities.
It’s difficult to mind, though, since when all this comes together towards the end, it’s riveting stuff. A stretch where Cosmo’s men are tracking Billy through his still-active phone to the safehouse he’s being held in while June and Hegarty are trying to secure authorization to move is great drama, combining institutional obstacles with good old-fashioned danger. It’s very grounded, but that grounding allows something as simple as a Deliveroo driver to feel like a highly dangerous proposition.
The performances obviously help. Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi continue to carry Criminal Record, but Dustin Demri-Burns also deserves a shoutout. We don’t see much of Cosmo in “Firestarters”, but what we do see is immediately off-putting, perhaps because of how close his far-right agitator persona is to several real-life grifting commentators. I’m both looking forward to seeing more of him and, obviously, not looking forward to seeing more of him at all. If Billy manages to help take him down, maybe he deserves that pardon after all.
