Summary
Criminal Record manages to sustain tension right through “Going Down”, all while setting up a high-stakes finale through careful storytelling.
For the most part, there’s a single source of tension in the penultimate episode of Criminal Record Season 2. There’s nothing new about it, since it’s the same tension that many recent episodes have burned for fuel. But Episode 7, “Going Down”, sustains it throughout the entire runtime with expert craft. Billy remains undercover in Cosmo’s organisation, Cosmo is probably on to him, and the police have to weigh up pulling him out or leaving him in place in the hopes of uncovering more actionable intelligence about a wider conspiracy.
This doesn’t quite make Billy the main character, but it makes him the most crucial piece of the puzzle. Since we pick up from where we left off, he barely has a moment to breathe. His frantic call to JP to tell him that Cosmo’s planned attack is imminent, and that he has found some building plans that might reveal the intended target, opens this episode as it closed the previous one. Naturally, he’s almost caught. Cosmo won’t leave him alone for a minute. But whether that’s because he has figured him out or because of a latent homoerotic connection that “Going Down” implies very strongly, isn’t immediately obvious.
This is the predicament June finds herself in. She’s still in charge of Operation Samphire, which is now a joint operation with Counter Terror, but while Cosmo’s telling Billy that it’s time for him to step up and make a difference, she’s having to determine whether he’s still in play as an asset. If he is, he can remain in place and find more information about the bombs and their intended target. If he isn’t, the police need to cut their losses and haul everyone in. With limited eyes inside The Depot after Cosmo killed the CCTV, she has to make a judgement call. She determines that Billy is still active and the arrest team is stood down.
Hegarty, now set up on his own, tries to keep an eye on the situation too. But Internal Affairs are looking into him and his team, including JP, whose phone is taken as part of their investigation. Since that phone is Billy’s primary point of contact, IA’s due diligence is putting him even further at risk. And more to the point, how is Hegarty able to access confidential operational surveillance feeds, even in disgrace? More on this a bit later.
In the meantime, we might as well discuss the meat of Criminal Record Season 2, Episode 7, which is the relationship between Cosmo and Billy. There has been a sense of it before now, obviously, but “Going Down” very specifically implies that Cosmo is into Billy on a sexual level. That’d explain his grooming of him while he was in prison, his somewhat misplaced trust in him until this point, and his constant violations of his personal space. The counter-argument would be that Cosmo is just fitting Billy up as a willing patsy, but I’m not so sure. Cosmo trying to slyly hold Billy’s hand kind of gives his game away.
For Billy, Cosmo’s wandering finger means an opportunity. He’s stuck for answers, since the building plans he was so adament showed the layout of the target are quickly revealed to be for the gym itself. June tells him to keep digging, and the only way to do that is to meet Cosmo halfway on the gay stuff. But given that Billy initially reacted how you’d expect him to, snatching his hand away and storming off, he overplays his hand by suddenly showing Cosmo some physical intimacy. It isn’t immediately obvious, but Cosmo figures out he’s digging, which doesn’t go unnoticed by Hegarty.
June, though, trapped between her new responsibilities and a sudden outburst from JP, who confronts her at home about deliberately freezing her out only after meeting his fiance, putting the final nail in the coffin of June’s marriage, doesn’t notice how much of a pickle Billy is in until it’s too late. Before the police are able to move in, Cosmo corners Billy in a lift, trapping it between floors using the emergency button. It’s only Hegarty’s intervention that prevents the police from moving too early.
“Going Down” ends with Billy rumbled, forced to admit he has been working against Cosmo since he was recruited in prison, but it’s too late for Cosmo to do anything to him. Instead, he goes live to his incensed fanbase, who have already killed a uniformed officer in Beeston, riling them about his imminent arrest. Billy is safely snatched, but he’s now of no use to anyone, and Cosmo, despite having been arrested, remains one step ahead.
In a nice bit of circular writing, the blueprints of The Depot that Billy was holding up earlier turn out to expose a secret exit which Cosmo’s lieutenants use to escape from the gym, despite the whole place being staked out by Counter Terror. As it turns out, they have been across the operation with Billy for the entire time, meaning that Hegarty hadn’t gone rogue when he sprang Billy out. Now, he and June have barely any time left to find Cosmo’s goons and his explosives before they commit some kind of atrocity. And they have no idea where to look.
