'Unforgotten's Suspects Bring a Fresh Perspective on Our Victim

As expected, Unforgotten's third episode opens with the team quickly starting to round up the names of the suspects we've already met. Ram's tip about the ex-employee who was not paid during the pandemic leads to the pub's manager, a lovely lady named Alice (Sabrina Wu), who gives them Marty's name and a heads-up that he's disabled. She's of Asian descent, and though she never says it outright, her description of Cooper to Fran that "he was an old white guy" already rings alarm bells. As it is, her opinion of the Coopers' marriage is that Juliet thought herself more intelligent than her husband, as she taught at a college and he owned pubs.

Unfortunately, Fran doesn't ask if Cooper was having an affair; she might have gotten a straight answer of yes. Instead, Jess asks Juliet if her husband slept around, and receives a denial vehement enough that even Taylor recognizes her mother is lying to her face. She won't let mum out of family therapy either, which promises to be a fun ride. ("What are you seeking?" the therapist asks her. Taylor: "Honesty." Ouch.) Juliet is so rattled that she drops her fight with the students and agrees to meet with Liz and her friends to discuss whether her English course is too colonialist in 2025 and offer an apology for giving her a deliberately provocative book to read.

Speaking of the other woman, Mel's just been informed that her fiancé (apparently also drunk when they were hit by someone more intoxicated than they were) is not only paralyzed from the waist down, but impotent as well. Considering she still has to break all of this to him, it's somewhat understandable she's also acting like a complete idiot about Gerry's body being found, leaving not only last week's phone record for the team to see, but an unfortunate Google search history to boot.

Meanwhile, Asif is already having enough personal crises without Jess and Sunny on his doorstep. His partner (husband?), Sam (David Witts), has arrived home a week early. Suddenly, Asif's comments to Hassan about "men like you and me" not doing well in detention centers snap into focus, as does "his path to legality" not being a thing Hassan wants to experience*. Sam is furious that Asif didn't tell him about smuggling "an illegal" into this country, only for Asif to remind him that the reason they survived in Afghanistan was due to Hassan. 

(*I do not think he means marrying a U.K. soldier for a green card; he and Sam are clearly in love. But the small boat Channel crossing he risked — which capsized, killing the brother he was traveling with — led to his being in a detention center, and I would not be surprised if it forced him into some form of prostitution to survive while Sam worked to get him out.)

Sam protests that they could have done this a better way, asking why Asif would risk his own chance at citizenship, along with the career of the only person who can legally protect him, to get Hassan out of danger. Asif doesn't mince words: the U.K. spat in the faces of men like him and Hassan, leaving them to die at the hands of the Taliban as collaborators, or to be publicly tortured for their sexuality; he spits in the face of their unjust, inhumane immigration system, and is rescuing his fellow countrymen the only way he can.

Asif's connection to the case finally turns up when Murray visits the property management company and speaks to Sarah (Rachel Denning), the account manager for the Cooper-owned flats. She all but calls him a slumlord, noting that the flats were almost exclusively let to asylum seekers, which she believed was probably due to a deal with the council. (Though she doesn't spell it out, her tone suggests he wasn't doing it for charity.) Either way, they stopped managing his properties in 2019 because his refusal to spend money meant they were failing in their "Moral duty of care." 

Without the property management company, Cooper had to maintain the flats himself, which included acting like a thug, physically shaking down his tenants, to collect rent. When the company was alerted to this behavior, they dropped him entirely in mid-2020. As Murray leaves, Sarah chases after him with a contact for one of the longest-running disputes over rent collection, an Afghan family. She hands him Asif's phone number, not because he was party to the complaint, but because he was the interpreter hired by one of the lawyers. Of all the folks caught up in this mess, his story feels like it's going to turn out the most tragic, especially when Sarah notes what a lovely person he was.

One good thing seems likely to come out of this, though "good" is a fairly relative term. Sunny and Jess' arrival at Marty's is the catalyst needed to pry Dot and Marty out of their utterly untenable situation. Dot's nurse, Doreen (Lisa Davina Phillip), knows Marty is emotionally unable to look after his mum; she's had a social worker, Natasha (Shreya M. Patel), round to move Dot into care. They backed off when Marty began to show signs of physical acting out, promising nothing would happen today. As Jess gently puts Marty in the squad car (he requested they take him somewhere to talk), Sunny asks Fran to send someone over to look in on Dot. Five quid says she'll be moved before Marty gets back.

Marty is somewhat adorable under questioning, including declaring, "Violence is never the answer, D.I. Sunil Khan." He also innocently confirms everything Fran learned from visiting Paul (Andrew Paul), one of Cooper's assault victims. Gerry was a Brexiteer who believed all sorts of nonsensical Q-Anon-type things; he also ran a white supremacist website called U.K. United. It is unclear if that's the same one Marty spends his life on, but his talks with Cooper are a good origin theory for how he got into the manosphere in the first place. Meanwhile, Dot suddenly starts acting deeply strange; Marty has mentioned his dad multiple times in passing, which is understandable given that he was memorializing his dad's birthday in the premiere. Meanwhile, Dot is leaving him a message on his phone telling him that whatever he does, "don't mention your father!"

Poor Fran's down a rabbit hole looking into "U.K. United," which was more of a drinking club where everyone got to feel like they were righteous internet warriors. Fran finds a public video on Facebook where Mel is drunkenly crowing over Boris retweeting her, complete with tags to her full name and profile. Fran's jaw hits the floor as she recognizes Mel from TV, and realizes this was "the redhead" all Cooper's acquaintances have mentioned. (Interesting aside, Mel was apparently laid off from her job as a newspaper columnist for being an online racist creep less than a month after Gerry's death.) 

Suddenly, Juliet's declaration to Liz (and her diverse crew of SJWs) during the student meeting carries more weight than one might realize. She finds it not only absurd but repulsive to think "two white people sitting in a lecture hall of an elite university discussing the semantic niceties of the racial lexicon could meaningfully change the world."* I doubt Liz was lying; I'll bet Juliet did smirk while handing that book to the kid to shock her into shutting up. She thought Liz would understand that she was being shown her own latent, unexamined bigotry, that it would shame her to recognize it, albeit in a different format from the traditional. She should know a racist when she sees one; she knows what racism looks like up close.

The words she hurled at Liz — "I have 37 years more of life than you, I know more than you" — were the ones she couldn't express in therapy to Taylor. The teenager has always known her mother was lying about her father's death. When she believed he committed suicide, she read it as denial; now she knows it's murder, and her mother still isn't telling her the truth. Juliet must want to scream. You have no idea what it's like out there, you child.  

(Personally, I am here for Victoria Hamilton's take on the famous "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth" speech. That line was an all-time banger. No wonder this season broke viewership records in the U.K.)

For all that Ram Sidhu is a "disgrace to the badge," he was absolutely bang on with this case. Cooper was a right piece of work; the world was well clear of him once he was dead. So his wife was trying to get some gangster to take the fall, why? Eh, she probably knows who really did it and is protecting them. Let's not ask; some deaths are just not worth spending money on. Budgets were met, and Taylor was left to grow up comfortable and safe with the only responsible parent she had. Calling it suicide and walking away wasn't lazy; his handling of it was a kindness, and probably closer to justice than anything this team will be able to provide. 

At least their lives are also still disasters. Sunny has once again misunderstood the signals from a female co-worker (much like he did with Cassie in Season 1) and thinks the friendly conversations at the pub he's been having with Dr. Balcombe, errr, Leanne, are leading somewhere, so that's going to be awkward, especially because she's already put him on read. Jess and Steve's forthcoming blow-up is going to be uglier than awkward, now that Jess has gotten the truth about the affair from Debbie. 

As you may recall, last season, Steve tried to make it seem like Jess's sister was emotionally unstable and claimed she was lying about them having sex; it was an emotional affair that culminated in a single kiss. Though Debbie clearly still isn't mentally up to snuff, she is telling the truth when she says Steve slept with her multiple times. What she doesn't say (but Jess recognizes) is that the affair happened because Steve took advantage of her deteriorating mental state. Jess has made her choice on who she's siding with, and it won't be Steve. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm buying popcorn.

Unforgotten Season 6 continues with new episodes every Sunday at 10 p.m. ET on most local PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel. All six episodes are available for members as a binge drop via PBS Passport. As always, check your local listings. 

Unforgotten Seasons 1 through 5 are available to stream on PBS Passport for members.