After five nights of misleading flashbacks, misremembered evidence and mystifyingly un-barrister-like behaviour, the verdict is in on Anthony Horowitz’s suffocation-in-Suffolk psychodrama. Although the conclusion may not be as rewarding as viewers who have stuck with the serial deserve, there is at least enough resolution to make it feel as if watching all week was worth it.
Throughout Injustice, it has been difficult to be entirely certain whose view of events has been correct, the use of subtly different versions of the same scene, building up a picture that is cloudier than a wet weekend in Walsham-le-Willows. So to be in possession of the full facts, as we finally are in the penultimate scene of the concluding instalment, is quite satisfying – far more so, as it happens, than the actual denouement itself.
‘I can’t believe that in the end, it all boiled down to something so shabby – so pathetic – as a middle-aged man with child pornography on their computer,’ Will Travis says, and frankly, nor can we. It’s rather disappointing to find that Martin Newall (Nathaniel Parker) was guilty of the murder of Lucy Wilson (Jayne Wisener) after all; and it had nothing to do with oil companies dumping toxic waste all over the Middle East, animal rights activists sticking bombs under cars or undiscovered teenage literary geniuses hanging themselves in cells under the unwatchful eyes of a Terry Scott lookalike. It’s just that rather jaded old standby, paedophiliac pictures on PCs. As soon as the phrase ‘missing laptop’ cropped up, we should have realised.
However, the dramatic twist that follows the big reveal more or less makes up for what has gone immediately before. Having evaded arrest for blowing a hole in the head of the last murderer he successfully defended from justice, Will turns vigilante for a second time and shoots Newall in a car park, watched by the ghostly small boy (Joe Cole) who is the manifestation of the piece-packing procurator’s conscience. His guilt assuaged, Will returns to his old chambers in London and picks up where he left off before his nervous breakdown. As the screen fades to black, the impression left is that he will happily pick up the gun and undo the work he has done in court with a bullet again if he deems it necessary.
This rather murky morality runs through Injustice like waterways through the Fens. The guilty are all eventually punished for their crimes – including detestable detective Mark Wenborn (Charlie Creed-Miles), who is pushed down a flight of stairs to his death by his beaten but ultimately unbowed wife Maggie (Kirsty Bushell) – and it’s fairly satisfying to see them receive their just deserts, even if there’s something unpleasant about the way the way they have avoided being penalised in court. ‘That’s what the law does: they protect their own,’ DI Wenborn sneers at one point – and Will’s victory for vigilantism does seem to prove him right.
Injustice hasn’t been brilliant, but it’s been sufficiently entertaining across five successive nights to be judged a success. Whether the questions it has raised about the law and who the legal system really looks after will be remembered when the serial itself has faded from memory is another matter entirely.
Airs at 9pm on Friday 10th June 2011 on ITV1.