When Morph appears with a defibrillator in his lumpy hands and Alex is thrown across her still sparsely furnished room by the shock, you know she's in trouble. Back on Planet Earth, or wherever she's from, she's in a critical condition. It's a wonder she manages to do so much running around in her head. She's a professional. That's how she does it. And there are murdering, child-injuring animal rights protesters to be brought to book. Gene Hunt's reaction to a vivisection lab being under threat? "Send a Panda round." Classic.

The usual run-of-the-mill police story with its clues that "just happen" to be found in the right place at the right time and its Gene Hunt beatings was spiced up a bit this week by some spooky shit in a prison cell between DI Alex Drake and Mr Filch, who had somehow escaped from Hogwarts and been banged up for his temerity. He was pretending to be an animal rights activist - presumably that last spell on Mrs Norris had finally tipped him over the edge - and had gone on hunger strike in continued protest. But that didn't stop him mumbling a load of bollocks at Alex as she tried to make sense of it all, and appearing to her in a vision of over-enthusiastic bedtime teeth cleaning. As an attempt to ratchet up the mystery and tension surrounding Alex's "real" story, this didn't work at all.

The police took just long enough to cotton on to the only obvious accomplice to stretch the story out to an hour, and arrived at psychiatrist Jeremy's practice rooms just in time to stop him shooting Alex, or himself. The continuing trademark psychiatrist/psychologist dichotomy is becoming very old and barely worth a chuckle and Jeremy's contrition at being "forced" to do Filch's will was some of the most unconvincing drivel I've seen in a long while.

Meanwhile the series slow-burner story of police corruption lurched on another couple of pages. Kevin Hales was found dead in his cell, SuperMack tried to get Gene to post-fix his notes to say he was a suicide risk, Gene refused even in the face of some overtly suggestive Masonry and so SuperMack threatened to transfer him to Plymouth. Why Plymouth? I suppose it's meant to be some strange kind of torture - sending a Northerner just about as far South as he can go and still be on mainland Britain. The transfer will, apparently, take two weeks to process, so Gene better polish up his knuckledusters because if he doesn't sort it sharpish, he'll be booking seagulls for shitting on the strand.