While several storylines may have taken a stride forward in The Hour tonight, the one that is likely to leave viewers the most intrigued, or possibly bewildered, is the revelation that Liz and Randall had a daughter together: registered in Barcelona; current whereabouts unknown.

Whether this is an exciting revelation of a hidden past or a plot development that belongs to the world of daytime soap opera will be purely a matter of taste. It may be a certain truth that, when you have actors of the calibre of Peter Capaldi and Anna Chancellor in your cast, you are obliged to use them front and centre. Few actors around can do whiskey-sodden, cigarette-tinged regret quite so well as Duckface. But it is possible that, in invoking the shadow of Francoist Spain and the after-effects of the Spanish Civil War, The Hour may be exploiting one historical twist too many.

Alongside Laika the dog, the British Defence Union and the Wolfenden report, it feels like the mix is becoming too heady: that the griminess of 1950s Notting Hill is now being offset by the more romanticised storyline of journalists on the battlefront. Stylistically, it makes a kind of sense: The Hour has always enjoyed depicting the passion and the sang-froid of compromised idealists. It has always had one foot in Pitman’s Typing Manual and the other in The English Patient. But when the drama has worked best, it’s been because of the implosive sense of events careering towards their own destruction.

Thus the rather more convincing plot tonight was, in fact, the main one: of the corruption at the heart of the police service, and of the single giveaway of a rather gaudy mantelpiece ornament. Kiki Delaine (Hannah Tointon), once both policeman’s moll and abuse victim, now looks rather more the cynical self-made woman, prepared to suffer what indignities she may so long as she exits the scene with a full purse and a man at her heels. It is a pact with the devil, of course. But there’s something very compelling about Kiki’s cold dead eyes and the knowledge of what sewers of perversion they have seen.

Gangland boss, Mr Cilenti, is a bad’un. We know this because he fashions his own paper swans, or gets his network of observers to do so – there being nothing more disturbing than a man who is into paper topiary.

In this world, as The Hour is at pains to remind us, the fantasies of men can always be indulged, so long as they are heterosexual and so long as no one looks too far beneath the formica service at the domestic double standards. Isaac, bless him, tries to shine a dramatic spotlight on the quiet torment in the 1950s’ kitchen; but, in one of the episode’s best lines, he has been told, witheringly, that his writerly efforts are ‘less kitchen sink, more fitted carpet’.

Thus, it is up to an unlikely source to big it up for the minorities: him from Benidorm, Jake Canuso, dropping the Spanish accent to campaign for homosexual reform. Now, we at CultBox are all against typecasting. Even so, it’s a quite startling guest appearance and one that distracts from what should be the main point of focus: Hector finally finding his journalistic feet and sticking it to corrupt Laurie on live television.

What next? Janine Duvitski turning up as madam of El Paradis? We’d love to suggest such a thing, but fear the internet equivalent of a white paper swan on our desks. Far better, then, to wonder what cost to Hector his moment of morality and to hope that next week’s episode has the grace to deal with Lex’s storyline with its more usual class: a little less soap, then, and a little more opera.

Aired at 9pm on Wednesday 28 November 2012 on BBC Two.

> Buy Series 1 on DVD on Amazon.

> Order Series 2 on DVD on Amazon.

What did you think of the episode? Let us know below…