Trigger Point, episode 4 recap: shock deaths, red herrings and terrorists under the bed

Just when you thought it was safe to drive your own car...

Case just got even more personal for Lana

It’s been a bad few weeks at the office for bomb disposal officer Lana Washington (Vicky McClure). First her partner-in-wire-snipping Joel "Nut" Nutkins (Adrian Lester) was blown to smithereens. Now it was the turn of her younger brother, Billy (Ewan Mitchell).

Frankly, it’s been coming ever since “mardy?” Billy tipped up at Nut’s funeral, jobless, disenfranchised and mumbling about being “at war” with Muslims. He’d been radicalised by shadowy far-right group The Crusaders. When he failed to turn up to his police interview or birthday celebrations, alarm bells rang even louder.

Lana’s fears were confirmed when Commander Bregman (Ralph Ineson) broke the devastating news: Billy had met up with suicide bomber Nick Roberts and was involved with the Crusaders’ terror cell. Now Silly Billy had been fooled into driving into the City, where an anti-fascist rally was taking place (aka “a load of leftie w----rs”).

Lana deduced there was a bomb in the car. Billy duly found a wire in his footwell, leading to a device in the glovebox. Its timer had less than eight minutes remaining. Cue a propulsive set piece, reminiscent of the finale of sister show Bodyguard with its “Richard Madden walking through London wearing a bomb vest” sequence.

First her best mate, now her brother

A sweaty all-action sequence - filming during a summer heatwave has its dramatic benefits - saw Lana talk down Billy by phone. She instructed him to drive away from the crowds to a safer location in a nearby park. Billy ran out of mobile battery (always at the least opportune moments, isn’t it?) but some tyre-squealing driving meant Lana was soon on the scene.

Sirens wailed. Helicopters whirred. Snipers took position. With three minutes left on the countdown clock, Lana peered through the windows and worked out the timer was a decoy. It was a trap designed to spook Billy. Well, it worked.

The bomb was actually rigged to detonate when he opened the driver’s side door. The expo team planned to extract him but it was too late. Despite Lana’s efforts to calm him down, her brother panicked and fumbled for the door handle. Ka-boom. Bye-bye, Billy.

Inside man could be a “Jed herring”

Exec-producer Jed Mercurio has long been partial to narrative misdirection. That’s how he’s kept guessing through Line of Duty’s six series. Is he at it again with Lana’s dastardly colleague John Hudson (Kris Hitchen)?

Sure, he’s been behaving suspiciously and Lana found damning evidence in his locker. But arriving mid-series, this always looked a tad too neat. Could the annotated A-Z merely be part of John’s own investigation? Lana learned that Billy wasn’t alone when he drunkenly vandalised a halal butchers. He’d been drinking flaming sambucas with John and the pair left the pub together. Yet John flat-out denied they were that well-acquainted.

Tailing him, Lana saw John scoping out a local Jewish Centre. After a mosque and LGBT venue, Jewish people might well be next on the Crusaders' list of minorities to attack. Ginger John had also pulled a sickie shortly before the Five Oaks pub bombing. We heard how the far-Right had changed tactics, switching from using known extremists to grooming “the disillusioned, the unemployed, the left-behind” - a description which fitted Billy to a tee. Did it also fit John?

Lana became so fixated on John’s guilt that Lana furiously attacked him at New Scotland Yard (in front of her boss, foolishly) and got put on compulsory personal leave. But has she got it wrong? Is Lana looking one way while the real culprit lurks over her other shoulder?

Is Lana’s lover Karl a wrong ’un?

Well, it was one way to deal with her grief. Lana immediately fell into bed with Karl Maguire (Warren Brown). The pair had been growing increasingly close since Nut’s funeral. After ice cream and another game of pool (the pair’s chosen form of flirtation), their affair went to the next level.

Is Karl too good to be true? Well, he’s a mechanic and fellow army veteran, so would be technically proficient. He shows lots of interest in Lana’s work. He’s also hinted at having trouble readjusting to civilian life and "dark stuff". Could he still be fighting the Afghan war now he’s back home? Brown has teased that “everyone’s a suspect”, the scamp.

Or is boyfriend Thom the traitor?

His condescending manner with Lana has been bugging us but is there more to DI Thom Youngblood (Mark Stanley)? When Lana showed her boyfriend the evidence she’d gathered on Hudson, his first reaction was to officiously pull rank about breaches of confidence and inadmissible evidence. “You did the right thing, bringing this to me,” he eventually conceded. “I’ll take care of it.” Take care of it by shutting it down?

He berated her when she followed John for interfering with active surveillance. Could Youngblood and Hudson be working together, either for nefarious purposes or in a covert undercover op? Youngblood also dragged his heels frustratingly when getting answers from Porton Down about the classified weapons-grade explosives. And did you notice that lingering shot of him after Billy’s car detonated? Heck, he’s even got “blood” in his surname. (We’re over-thinking this, aren’t we?)

A few duff notes but death had impact

We dealt with those “no helmet” gripes last week but here there were other plausibility problems. Why did Lana walk away, leaving the clearly panicking Billy alone in the car? Her sudden attack on John felt out of character, too. So did jumping into bed with Karl straight after Billy’s death. The anti-fascist demo was deeply unconvincing. There were also a couple of clumsy expositional speeches - first from Finchy, sorry, Bregman, then from Lana during her FaceTime call with Sonya (Kerry Godliman).

All that said, killing Billy made for an effective high-stakes twist, reminding us that nobody is safe. McClure did most of the emotional heavy lifting - see that affecting silent scene with her parents - but Mitchell did a decent job conveying Billy’s mounting terror, too.

Trigger Point lingo decoded

We heard how the terrorists were using “cleanskins” - operatives with no criminal record, unknown to the authorities. The term entered wider use after the 7/7 attacks, when the four bombers didn’t fit the expected profile.

Compound HMX-319 is nicknamed “Her Majesty's Explosive”. The torched Toyota had “the VIN removed from the chassis”, meaning the vehicle identification number which serves as the car's fingerprint. Billy’s motor “tripped an ANPR camera” - Automatic Number Plate Recognition, enabling police to record vehicles’ locations.

Sniper and bomber still out there

Amid all the excitement, it was easy to forget the tower block shooter. As the episode began, a crime scene had been formed around the white Prius (aka “the Uber in a haystack”) which he used as a getaway vehicle. He’d dumped it in a CCTV black hole, blown it up and left no prints. In short, a pro.

Police were now seeking the same bomb-maker for all the attacks. Their distinct three-part signature? Use of HMX-319, secondary devices, military wire-tying techniques. With professionally trained terrorists still at large, Bregman said it “considerably raises the threat level”. Like it wasn’t high enough already.

Penultimate episode is upon us

We left with Lana revisiting the site of Billy’s death. Her colleagues were searching for evidence amid the wreckage under the supervision of John, apparently promoted to senior expo in Lana’s absence. She glared at him meaningfully before striding off, now a woman on even more of a mission.

Next Sunday’s penultimate episode sees a massive manhunt for the bomber, who now has political targets in his sights. Rendezvous here to erect a cordon around it.