Summary
Criminal Record Season 2 keeps getting better and better, with “Duty of Care” standing out as the best, most suspenseful hour yet.
It’s all going a bit wrong, isn’t it? Personally, professionally, politically, whatever you like, Criminal Record Season 2 is turning into a real house of cards. This has been true since the beginning, but it’s by far the most true in Episode 5, “Duty of Care”, which not only serves as a reminder that June and Hegarty historically don’t get on very well, but also puts Billy in the direst predicament yet. We’ve got tech issues, institutional cover-ups, relationship dilemmas, and, perhaps most crucially, bombs. There’s a lot going on.
The bombs shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since Billy confirmed Cosmo had the detonators. This helps to form the first part of “Duty of Care”, since Cosmo, who — let’s be frank — is pretty explicitly Tommy Robinson-coded, is smugly doing the political podcast circuit and riding high on the “win” of having been arrested and released without charge on the back of his “nobody died” stunt. The police are trying to find the tugboat containing the detonators, not realising that it’s really a high-rise flat bathroom that has been turned into a chemistry lab that they probably need to be worrying about.
In short order, the police find the boat, which is named the Alfie Buchanan, and the bomb squad heads aboard to find the detonator case empty. They were presumably offloaded overnight, which means there’s still no evidence linking Cosmo to any terror plot. Their only hope remains Billy, who is still in situ with the gang, despite the fact that Kieran recognised June from his safehouse and clearly put the pieces together that Billy is an inside man. He just hasn’t had the chance to tell Cosmo yet. He will, though, since they’re all heading out on a celebration-cum-boot-camp in Thetford Forest, which is where “Duty of Care” really kicks into another gear. More on this in a minute.
In the meantime, June once again goes to see Ashley Jones, who has been caught screaming bloody murder about Billy Fielding outside the Hackney station. Remember, officially, Billy is still in prison, so this needs to be nipped in the bud. For some reason, Hegarty is oddly reluctant for June to get involved here, and it quickly becomes apparent why. Ashley just so happens to mention to June that she tried to see Billy in prison about three months prior as a kind of forgive-and-forget exercise, to hopefully help her move on. She backed out, though, as she was told that if Billy showed contrition while meeting with her, he’d be released early. And she was told that by none other than Hegarty.
This immediately gives June serious flashbacks. It’s a cogent reminder that even in Season 2, Criminal Record is a show about two people who very much don’t get on, one of whom simply cannot be trusted. Episode 5 proves Hegarty has been playing everyone from the beginning, which probably should have been obvious, but his endgame still isn’t exactly clear. June tries to report her discovery to JP, with whom she’s pretty openly conducting an affair at this point, but he’s out of reach given that the forest is a dead zone and he and Kim have been assigned to keep an eye on Billy.
I said I’d return to that, so here we are. The loss of signal means Billy’s phone stops working, so the police — Sian is there as tech support — are forced to rely on an old-school directional mic instead. Through it, while watching the gang sit around a campfire and eat a deer they killed with a crossbow, Kim and JP hear Kieran confront Billy about working with the police. Kieran isn’t especially convincing — at one point, he just starts shouting “June Lenker!” over and over — but there’s obviously merit to what he’s saying, so Billy can’t wriggle out of it too easily. He’s forced to put on a hardcase performance about being a real killer, unlike all these other pretenders, which buys him some time, but Kim and JP are genuinely worried that he might end up being hanged from a tree before they can get to him.
And there are so many obstacles in the way of them getting to him. They’re outnumbered, so they can’t just charge into the clearing, but the armed unit is half an hour away. To make matters worse, when Kim finally gets through to Hegarty, he orders them to just watch everything play out, though notably, Kim isn’t very clear about Billy having been compromised. June is on her way, since JP shared his location, and she might wander straight into the camp. It’s all a giant mess, and fizzes with tension as a result.
Out of nowhere, Marco, the Suffolk Square killer, arrives with a van that has a bomb in the back. This is clearly intended to be a test run of the explosives, and Billy, still overcompensating from Kieran’s accusation and rattled by Cosmo waving a crossbow around, volunteers to be the guinea pig. He accompanies Marco into a cabin so he can see how the bomb works, ready for the real thing. This is the moment that JP decides to intervene. But his infiltration of the cabin goes badly wrong, and he draws a load of attention to himself. Billy uses the distraction to upend the table and detonate the bomb with all three of them still inside. As of now, we have no idea who might have died, though given it was a fairly large explosion, I think we have cause to wonder.
Criminal Record wouldn’t kill off two main characters and an extra in one fell swoop, would it?
