'Unforgotten' Season 4, Episode 5 Recap: "Always Crashing In The Same Car"
As Unforgotten careens towards the Season 4 finale next week, Cassie is all but off the rails. When the episode starts, she's going to see her father, accusing him again of being manipulated to change his will, getting in a screaming match on the stoop. Afterward, John points out she's not angry about the choice, but her father slowly disappearing. She can let go of it and the anger at being denied her pension, etc. They don't need it. She can quit tomorrow, move down south with him, live their lives together.
Though Cassie agrees to call her father and ask forgiveness, she refuses to give up the case. We already know it's the wrong decision; it's just a matter of how bad it will be.
Sunny: Would a woman stab a man in the head
Cassie: If he made easy sexist assumptions, very possibly.
Last week Murray found the pub, and this week, he finds the truth of the incident, tracking down Suzie (Elizabeth Counsell), who ran the place during that era. She confirms what fans already guessed, Walsh's "pass" at Fiona was sexual assault. She ups it further with the reveal Ram didn't beat up Walsh, but rather the other way round. Walsh beat down Ram, humiliating him. We also get a witness who saw the five putting a body in the car and a fight between two of them over how to deal with the fallout. Finally, Balcombe has extracted the murder weapon from Walsh's skull: a gold-tipped fountain pen.
Barton isn't Dean's real surname. His real name is Quinn, and he changed it when he applied to be in the force because the men in his family are career criminals. His father spent half his life inside; his brothers are still active. They beat him to a pulp as a traitor when he tried to join the force. No wonder Dean was a natural copper, and no wonder he dropped out so fast. And no wonder he's kept most of it from Marnie, who stands by him when he finally tells her the truth about his past. Too bad Ram didn't get the same when he came clean to Anna. But to be fair, Dean was talking about his abusive family, while Ram was straight with Anna this was a possible murder charge.
Dean and Ram aren't just facing fallout from their spouses. To track down Dean's past, Cassie and Sunny find his mother, Mary Quinn (Kate Williams), on oxygen and her last legs. Despite Dean's brother Sean's (Brett O'Shaughnessy) blowing up over at cops in the house, she tells them she hasn't heard from Dean for 30 years. She begs the two for details about his life and perhaps even an address. Cassie at first refuses but finally relents, and Mary heads to see him, probably for the last time. As for Ram, he heads home to see his parents, knowing this might be the last time, hoping to make his father talk to him. But as it has been for the past 30 years, he is denied.
As for Liz and her blackmail problem, Eugenia's already let it go — she would never have gone through with it anyway, especially on the word of her horrific mother. She's not wrong; Liz deserves better from that woman. That woman, for the record, is genuinely amused by what she learned from her husband in his final days as he lost hold of reality and babbled on. As she sees it, Liz's crimes that she confessed to her father means she's finally become interesting. But perhaps a little too interesting, as her mother realizes Liz is also more dangerous than she ever gave her credit for.
Meanwhile, the Fiona rabbit hole keeps going: She's not a licensed therapist. Her degree is real, but her license is fake, the dangerous driving charge meant she couldn't get accredited. Geoff is stunned. His wife, who he's taken out a massive loan to open her own practice, has been working fraudulently this whole time. He insists she tell the kids, which everyone will come to regret. Fiona goes full boundary-less wonder and begins to confess to the children, not about the car crash or the baby, but about Walsh — which I may remind you Geoff doesn't know about. Blessedly, Fran walks in, interrupting this verbal car crash, but not fast enough to stop Fiona from saying in front of god and everyone: "You've come about the body, haven't you?"
As Cassie hoped, Fiona is the weakest link. She and Sunny already went after Liz to no avail; 30 years in the force meant all they got was a well-practiced and expertly constructed wall of insider knowledge of how these games are played. However, Fiona doesn't even need to be threatened with jail time to start cooperating. She straight-up volunteers Ram and Rob chased the guy down, and when she finally caught up to them, Ram claimed to have found Walsh fallen, his head smashed in. Ram was giving the guy CPR, declaring it an accident, and, in Fiona's telling, he led the cover-up. She insists she's believed all this time it was an accident and a cover-up that derailed her entire life.
As the episode draws to a close, Cassie stops in to see Balcombe about the pen, learning it's the kind that has serial numbers, which could identify the owner. As she pilots the car home, still hoping to hear from her father to patch things up, all four suspects are also in the driver's seat after this long, emotional day.
And then, as Cassie rolls through an intersection, her car deliberately rammed on the driver's side. And the world goes black.
