‘Criminal Record’ Season 2, Episode 3 Recap – Tick, Tick, Boom

There are two ways of looking at Criminal Record Season 2. One is a more conventional thriller, which is the level that I think it’s slightly disappointing on. But the other is something else, a tightly wound drama about social issues and institutional pressure. Episode 3, “Snakes and Ladders”, is beginning to feel slightly repetitive already, with extended stretches of tension-building that evoke the Suffolk Square riot in the premiere and the multilayered efforts to approve Billy Fields as an undercover asset last week. As a thriller, that’s arguably a problem. But when the theme is how endlessly difficult it is to navigate such combustible social and systemic mechanisms, the repetition is the point.

Billy is in over his head; that much is clear from the beginning. He’s in the midst of Cosmo Thompson’s far-right gang with nothing but a bug hidden in his chain. Almost immediately, he’s made to fight one of Cosmo’s lieutenants in a tiny MMA cage in the middle of their gym hideout. Cosmo, ever the antagonist, simply spurs things on.

The interesting aspect of the narrative is that Hegarty is forced to justify this. Is Operation Samphire worth it? Is the danger presented by Cosmo overstated? Will the amount of actionable intelligence outweigh the risk of springing Billy from prison and covering up his escape? Hegarty is passionately in favour and is quick to remind his superiors that just because the far right aren’t suicide bombers doesn’t mean that they won’t commit terrible atrocities. But he needs something real to prove that. And that means finding the elusive bomb-maker amongst Cosmo’s goons, none of whom seem to fit the profile.

There isn’t a great deal of focus on the procedural aspect of this. Instead, we venture into much murkier moral territory, since Hegarty also tasks June with leveraging her personal connection with Ashley, Cerys’s mum, so that she stops shouting her mouth off about having seen Billy in her flat. It’s important for the police to keep a lid on his escape since all the information about it is embargoed lest it threaten the ongoing operation. June isn’t thrilled about having to do this, but she also doesn’t think about it a great deal either. She knows what needs to be done.

So, too, does Margo Whitaker, a left-leaning MP who seems to be emerging as a target of opportunity to Cosmo and his gang. In the gym conversations that Billy’s chain picks up, Cosmo jokes about lopping off her head at an upcoming memorial for Rohaan. Once again, someone has to beam in from a legal department to determine whether or not anything being said constitutes an actionable threat or a bleak private conversation. There isn’t enough to go on, legally speaking, thus proving quite how much can be said and gotten away with if you phrase it the right way. It forces the police into inaction, which means they can’t adequately control the memorial, which is taking place, like the original attack, in Suffolk Square.

Margo refuses to take the potential threats against her life especially seriously, or at the very least refuses to be seen doing so. It’s her job to reassure everyone, and the police’s job to make sure she’s right. But Criminal Record Season 2, Episode 3 recreates the visceral tension of the premiere’s riot by having the memorial feel dense with potential threats, far too many for June and the rest of Operation Samphire to deal with at once. All of Cosmo’s goons are present, wearing backpacks. There are men on the roof nearby. June’s son is there with Leo, ostensibly to support her.

You can tell it’s all going to go wrong, and it does, but not in the way anyone was expecting. Cosmo simply unfurls a banner from the roof reading “Nobody Died”, part of his big marketing campaign claiming that the establishment fabricated Rohaan’s death to vilify the right. He’s arrested, and then, because his incarceration will blow the op, released, only underlining his rhetoric. He ends the memorial much more popular than he was before, without having to do anything that would land him in a cell. It’s a very smart play.

Following this, Billy’s escape is leaked, which puts him in the firing line within Cosmo’s gang. June suspects that Hegarty was responsible for the leak in an effort to protect the op, and she’s probably right, but it proves how cavalier he’s willing to be with Billy’s life if that’s the case. Predictably, Billy is stuffed in the trunk of a car and dragged before Cosmo, who removes his shirt and then his chain, almost as if he knows it’s a bug. But the obscured audio can be cleaned up just enough for the gist of Cosmo’s statements to be revealed: Tick, tick, boom.

That certainly implies there’s a bomb threat on the horizon. We also don’t quite know whether June is right about Hegarty leaking Billy’s escape, or indeed if Rohaan’s murder weapon, which he gives to June, claiming to have found in a locker at Cosmo’s gym, is the real deal. That lack of surety is the point of everything. And it doesn’t look like things are going to be made clearer any time soon.