Edge of Darkness Episode 3 "Burden Of Proof"

One of the things I like about Edge Of Darkness is Troy Kennedy Martin's clever - and ironic - use of episode titles. There are lots of questions of fact here - the inquiry, how Lowe came to make his sudden plunge from six floors up, who killed Shields and why (in an interesting coincidence, Tim McInnerny turns up in Spooks tomorrow night) but the real burden of proof is suddenly on Craven. He's gone from being the bereaved father to crazed conspiracy theorist in the eyes of colleagues, refusing to accept an open and shut case and finding his sanity under question very publically.

Many thrillers with deal with the secret services have the participants treating the whole thing as a game, and there is an air of that here, notably in the little pattern of relationships between Harcourt, Pendleton, Jedburgh and Clemmie, all seeming to have switched sides at will. But there's also the air of a player suddenly raising the stakes, with whatever's going on at Northmoor a dangerous gambit that puts the play into a new arena.

Jedburgh does have ties with Gaia, as I suspected, and seemingly very deep ones. It's interesting to look at what he says earlier in the episode about terrorism and going 'into the darkness' in the light of that later revelation - who's game is he playing? Is it just CIA orders, or is he playing his own game in the middle of the bigger one. The question of motives hangs over a lot of people's actions - who's being ordered, and who's just doing what they think is the right thing?

Interestingly, the imagery of the nuclear trains disappears in this episode - will it come back, or was that merely foreshadowing before the inquiry put IIF centre stage? And Zoe Wanamaker seems to be another actor with Jeff Goldblum Syndrome - she looks like she's hardly aged between 1985 and now.