We’re starting to understand the shape of our victim a little bit now, if not our gang of likely but disparate suspects. We’ve got series 4 bringing up memories of bygone DCIs and will it pay off, in the end? It always does. Please join me after the break for my Unforgotten series 6 episode 3 recap.

We open at the police station with DI Sunil ‘Sunny’ Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar!) chatting on the phone with DCI Jess James (Sinéad Keenan), whom he dumps in a hot second when Dr. Leanne Balcombe (Georgia Mackenzie) beeps through about a possible location for DRINKS WOOOOO! Sunny and Lee get on great, and he’s been lonely! I know not if she has been as well, all I really know is that she let her hair go to its natural grey (awesome) and she is fetching in scrubs and they like to hang out.

Our lad Marty Baines (Maximilian Fairley) is good to his word, struggling through his massive social anxiety and his neurodiversity to apply for jobs, hoping to keep the flat he and his mum stay in.

**I am trying very hard to be sympathetic to young Marty as he is a vulnerable person being radicalized within the manosphere and his mental health treatment is falling through the cracks, but that has resulted in some abusive behaviour towards his sweet old mum and that’s a thousand percent not okay.

The cold case victim in this series is one Gerry Cooper; our DCI Jess James has come to speak to his widow for the third time. The first two times, Juliet Cooper (Victoria Hamilton) was adamant that Gerry had most likely been murdered by Albanian loan sharks, so Jess is here to explain that the police have essentially put that theory to bed. For one, there are records that the loan was paid back over a week before victim was murdered, and then there’s the plain common sense that loan sharks prefer live customers paying enormous amounts of vig, not dead ones bringing cops around.

Two other things of note came up last episode: Gerry appears to have had a girlfriend before he died, and the arresting officer in the original disappearance, one disgraced Ram Sidhu (Phaldut Sharma), believed a disgruntled former employee was a more likely culprit.

Jess floats both theories towards Juliet, who responds with immediate vitriol and denials.

This is all overheard by Juliet and Gerry’s teenaged daughter Taylor (Pixie Davies) who wants to know if it was true. Absolutely not, steams Juliet, so now we’re pretty sure it is.

And we think Melinda Ricci (MyAnna Buring) was that girlfriend, a spicy redhead having an affair with a hot priest while her partner recovers from a car accident in hospital in between throwing gasoline on the fire of far right conservative TV viewers. You know the type, ‘snowflake’ this, ‘wokerati’ that.

As always on Unforgotten, we’ve got four suspects in the death of our cold case victim, and those above are three quarters of the group. Our last person of interest is refugee translator Asif Syed (Elham Ehsas), motive as yet unknown.

We watch him with his fellow (but illegal) refugee family member Hassan (Ahman Sakhi) run around on the beach and I didn’t even know they had beaches like that in England! Where is this??

Asif tells the story of his crossing the sea with his brother, 33 people in a boat made for 12. His brother and 6 others did not make it after the boat tipped over in French waters.

DS Fran Lingley (Carolina Main) interviews the former pub employee we hear tell of last episode; Alice (Sabrina Wu) said everything was okay until lockdown except for this one guy…Martin. We know Martin, that’s Marty to us; he dropped flowers in the water for Gerry and called him his dad. But according to Alice, he didn’t take the lockdown and lack of furlough well. No idea yet why he wasn’t included in the furlough, but he was spotted by another pub worker slamming Gerry up against a wall.

**Google tells me that there was a Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme that involved businesses being able to receive up to 80% of wages in government grants if order to retain jobs during the pandemic.

One more thing; Alice heard Juliet and Gerry fighting all the time over the pub.

Asif and Hassan eat at Asif’s flat; he’s still very much in rumination about his treatment at the hands of the government who promised to protect him. Once he passes his citizenship course (that’s what he was studying for in the car!), he will get a passport and be legal and he wishes he could recommend that course of action to Hassan, but.

This tense moment is interrupted by the jaunty arrival of Sam (David Witts), a military man supposed to be on assignment for another week, but who has come home early to find Asif and Hassan. Is this Asif’s partner?

We don’t know, but we do find out that both Asif and Sam owe Hassan their lives. Being in the military, Sam can’t be here with an asylum seeker who has not and probably will not be officially asylum seeking, so he leaves, and Asif has one day to find somewhere for Hassan.

Marty glowers as care worker Doreen (Lisa Davina Phillip) and supervisor Natasha (Shreya M. Patel) explain the upcoming changes in Marty’s mum’s care; Dot (Michele Dotrice) will be moved to a home and Marty will get his own help. Marty’s aggression and animosity towards the care workers is growing. He’s still not sleeping, staying up late listening to very specific hate, now moving into racism along with all the other isms.

DC Karen Willetts (Pixie Nixon) searches up old police reports from the Whitney Marsh carpark.

Juliet and her daughter Taylor (Pixie Davies) have finally made it to joint therapy, Juliet just wants her daughter to be happy. Taylor would like some honesty, please.

Look at Sunny meeting Leanne (Dr. Balcombe to us) with a big hug and smile? How long has this been going on, then?! Who knew our medical examiner had cleavage?? One nice thing is that at least she would understand when he got called out or had to miss something.

They kiss!! They kiss because Leanne leaps at his face! He’s happy to receive it but she scampers after an apology and a ‘Night, dollface.’

We talked about Jess’ messy family situation last time; her wanker husband had an ’emotional affair’ with Jess’ sister, and while it looks like hubby is at it again, I don’t think it can be with Jess’ sister Debbie (Grainne Keenan) because I don’t think anyone at all has been at her place for a very long time. If depression was a room, it would be her whole flat, old takeaway containers everywhere and dishes piled up.

**I once dated someone who had this exact kitchen; an inspection was called for their condo so I helped them clean up, took us a whole night and then they kept my mop and broom. Depression can also make you an arsehole.

Jess and Debbie set Debbie’s place to rights and finally have a chat about what really happened between Debbie and Steve (Jess’ hubs); they did sleep together, of course. Steve lied, because that’s what Steve does.

**I also used to date someone like that! Everything was a lie, just slightly shaded variations of the truth, which means…lies. First I thought it was a bug that needed fixing, then I realised it was a feature and the core of who they were.

You can see every word fall on Jess like a blow; she breathes deeply through the pain, and then hugs her sister fiercely. She won’t let anything get in the way of that again.

The next morning, Sunny is already working on the next date with Leanne but we need to find out what’s happening with this long ago murder!

During a debrief in Jess’s office, DS Fran Lingely (Carolina Main) has found out the name of our victim Gerry Cooper’s girlfriend, it is our Melinda, and they used to be quite openly affectionate. Why would Melinda threaten Juliet about revealing her identity if she was quite happy to post videos of same on Twitter with her real name.

Another interesting lead has been found by DS Murray Boulting (Jordan Long), he found some CCTV footage of the night Gerry was attacked, to this point assumed by the Albanian mob. However, he’s only been able to turn up footage of CCTV about 30 minutes outside of the attack, so it’s not super solid. You also can’t see much, but it’s possible the probably assailant is stimming, and so may be on the spectrum. I know that’s a metric tonne of qualification, but really: if it’s Marty, that’s fine but there is no way he would have the brains to come up with this whole cut up and discard of Gerry’s body after the death. He’s just not sophisticated or organized enough for that.

Well that’s odd, now Fran’s turned up an assault by our victim against one David Prentice (Andrew Paul), what’s that about? Hold on, Murray’s interview with the management company handling Gerry’s rental properties gives us even more information about Gerry: he was a slumlord. Far from the landlords who were held hostage to non-eviction policies during COVID, Gerry was an absolute nightmare, refusing to spend any money at all and verbally abusing and intimidating any tenant who disagreed.

Who were these tenants? Almost exclusively asylum seekers, like our Asif, says agent Sarah Osborn (Rachel Denning).

Speaking of! Sam is Asif’s partner, but they’re not getting along very well right now, thanks to Asif’s ‘temerity’ in bringing Hassan into the country illegally. Asif is not gentle, he is angry and Sam is aghast that Asif would risk Sam’s career and Asif’s chance at citizenship to do all this.

Sunny and Jess land at Marty and Dot’s flat, Marty is angry and abusive to his mum, so they take him downtown for their interview. An appropriate adult is brought in to help him understand what the police are asking; she tells him to tell the truth. When he counters that he doesn’t want to get into trouble, surprised, she suggests he tell the truth anyway.

Fran’s been busy! She’s found David Prentice, who was assaulted by Gerry. David runs a boxing gym and was an old friend of Gerry’s. It was a Remain / Brexit conflict that got physical, Gerry having gone significantly further to the right over the years. He had a website called UK Unite. This website leads to identifying Melinda, thanks to a Boris Johnson retweet. Wait. Melinda was a nun before becoming a right wing rage baiter? Oh! That’s why she was humping the hot priest! I mean, maybe that’s not WHY, but that’s probably where she met him, then.

Juliet is not just dealing with the long ago death of her husband and all the suspicion around it and her daughter acting up; she also has a third battle ongoing in the form of her university students having decided she is a racist. Now white her and a very intelligent white student sit and argue about racism (in front of actual people of colour) and what is the point?

Marty’s interview is surprisingly informative; Gerry DID request furlough for him and it was paid to Gerry as confirmed by Marty’s dad, but Gerry did not in turn pay Marty, and that’s what they were fighting about. Marty said it was just a pushy shovey, but has no answer to Sunny’s question about the CCTV showing him near the violent assault. He asks to take a break ‘to get his story straight.’ There’s something about Marty’s dad too…what’s up with that? We saw him putting flowers on the water for his dad when we first met him; that lead me to believe that Gerry Cooper was his dad, but apparently not.

And that’s it! We’re out! Until next time, we’re halfway through!

As always, we’ve got all the hot buttons at play, including

• Brexit
• the rise of far right conservatism
• the growing anti-refugee sentiment
• COVID
• the manosphere
• populism
• autism
• asylum seekers
• many, many more
• the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and that awful pull out
• college campus wokeism
• general wokeism

So it will be interesting to see how it unfolds! Cheers, you lot.