Summary
After an explosive masterclass in tension, Criminal Record Season 2 gets into the weeds of the institutional aftermath in “When the Music Stops”. It might lack the taut suspense-building, but the character work and writing are top-tier.
If we’ve had the big night out, then “When the Music Stops” is very much the hangover that follows it. Criminal Record has proved in Season 2 that it can do suspense sequences as well as any other show, but in Episode 6, it proves — not for the first time — that it’s basically peerless when it comes to navigating the knotty institutional challenges underpinning all the excitement. Nobody gets blown up, there are no fraught stakeouts, and Billy is barely in it, but the stress is still palpable all the way through.
What’s more, the implications are massive. Two episodes are remaining in Season 2, and everything is already teetering on a knife-edge, so it’s hard to imagine how wrong it might all go. And it will go wrong, I feel relatively certain about that. How can it not? The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, the right hand thinks the left hand’s a dick, and the body in the middle just had a bomb go off in its face. Tortured idioms aside, things are not looking good for anyone, good guys or bad.
At the very least, though, JP and Billy are alive for now. Granted, neither of them is in brilliant nick, but that’s better than Marco Rivelli, whose proximity to the blast that closed out last week’s episode led to him being utterly vapourised, and with him any hope of bringing Rohaan’s killer to something resembling justice. Now Operation Samphire’s purpose is to save Billy and prevent whatever attacks Cosmo has planned, and even then, Billy’s safety is a very distant second-place in terms of priority.
That’s why Billy’s barely in “When the Music Stops”. After Kieran’s accusations and the unfortunate incident with the bomb, Cosmo is still looking at him with a fair amount of suspicion and is beginning to get a sense that he’s being observed in one way or another. He orders the gym security cameras to be disabled, blinding Samphire’s surveillance, and tasks Nigel with finding the knife that killed Rohaan, which Kieran kept for seemingly sentimental reasons when his job was to dispose of it. It eventually turns up, exonerating Billy to a certain extent, which is good news for Cosmo, who lovingly feeds him pregabalin and makes Kieran shake his hand. Cosmo’s relationship with Billy is… very weird, and apparently has been for a while, but it seemingly goes a bit beyond just an extremist and his pet martyr, even if it’s one-way traffic.
To Samphire, Billy’s loyalty might have shifted. During the stakeout in the woods, he gave the emergency signal — three coughs into a closed fist — twice, and was ignored both times. After surviving the blast, he turned his phone off. Hegarty is adamant that he’s still in the game, but June isn’t so sure, and rightly so. Hegarty left Billy for dead, and even now, his excuse for continuing the operation instead of making arrests based on the available evidence is that Billy’s tough guy routine to maintain his cover turned him into an agent provocateur, putting him at the centre of the conspiracy.
June’s more concerned with the fact that Hegarty knew Billy for much longer than he claimed. One of the better scenes in Criminal Record Season 2, Episode 6 is when she confronts him about having sabotaged Ashley’s meeting with him when she visited him in prison, which he eventually confesses to June and Ivy. His justification is that he heard through a source that Cosmo was grooming Billy on the inside, having taken a particular fascination with him. Hegarty wanted to flip Billy to turn him into an asset, but the only leverage he had was offering him early release. If he met with Ashley and showed contrition, that leverage might have been taken away.
It certainly doesn’t help the validity of Hegarty’s argument that his source was Tony Gilfoyle, which we already knew, but that Ivy and June are horrified to discover. Ivy is willing to let Hegarty keep running Samphire for a few more days, but June is like a dog with a bone. She goes to visit JP, who is now awake in the hospital, and asks him how Hegarty already had Billy’s meds in his pocket when they “caught” him by the canal. JP implies she’s being paranoid, which doesn’t sit well with her. Neither does the introduction of Ella, who is seemingly JP’s partner. Given he never mentioned that to June, I think we can safely say their fling is now on ice.
June then nips to Redheath prison to look through the vehicle logs on the day of Billy’s escape. Hegarty is also there, trying to get Tony out, but he’s too late to stop June from discovering the smoking gun evidence that Billy didn’t actually escape by hiding under a catering van, as claimed. Instead, he left in a police van procured by Hegarty, who recruited a convicted murderer as an undercover asset without any authority whatsoever, and then created the pretext of a prison escape to justify it. This also means that he must have been keeping an eye on Billy the whole time, including when he was at Suffolk Square, so he could have prevented Rohaan’s death and chose not to. When June presents all this to Ivy, she has no choice but to suspend Hegarty and install June at the head of Samphire. Hegarty is adamant that when the music stops, he’ll be waiting to pick up the pieces.
And he might be right. Samphire’s plan is not to bring in the suspects on the available evidence, which isn’t very compelling, but Billy manages to sneak a call to JP, coughing three times down the phone. For once, the signal is received. Billy tells JP that the attack is going ahead the next day, in London. And now the police might not be on the same page enough to stop it.
