Spoilers

A cop believes he was possessed – and the truth starts to catch up with Kristen…

This is the hell of an episode to go into a brief mid-season break on, as the racist discussions that have been part of the show this time around come front and centre, with a cop trying to claim that he was possessed by a demon when he shot a person of colour in a traffic stop… and Kristen benefitting from white privilege in an almost obscene way.

The cop thread takes the team on to the set of a TV show (any resemblance to long running police shows and/or their creative personnel is of course entirely coincidental)  and a suggestion that the sigil of protection that the real cop bears is something that stretches back through decades of cop shows. How many people would have put money on this show referencing CHiPs? The way things pan out, both David and Ben (who has some issues of his own this week with his nocturnal visitor – and one of the nastier scenes in the series to date) find themselves on the receiving end of negative police treatment…

…as Kristen is being let off the hook for murder. Yes, it is spelled out as blatantly as this: the white, “soccer mom” commits murder, her friend who’s a cop knows it, and it’s going to be covered up. And that’s after Kristen has tried to get one of her daughters to be economical with the truth and give her an alibi. Some shows (Prodigal Son, for example) have been blatant in their coverage of the issue, but I don’t know of any that have taken it this far.

The question remains – will Kristen’s own guilty conscience allow her to get away with this? Katja Herbers does a tremendous job portraying Kirsten’s conflict, and it’s going to be fascinating to see where this goes.

Verdict: A truly horrifying instalment, but not for the reasons you might expect. 9/10

Paul Simpson