Season1#3 In the Trap: Summary and Review

Following a tip-off from DC Kate Fleming, DS Steve Arnott arrives at Laverty's house. He finds out that DCI Tony Gates is already searching the property. Gates claims that he has come to arrest Laverty. His advantage may be small, but he was at the property to help mislead the plot by tampering with evidence at the scene.

Before his team arrives the evidence, he tampers with includes the wiping down of a bottle to remove his prints and hiding his whiskey glass, they discover Jackie’s body has disappeared. Arnott suspects and demands that Forensics dust the table for fingerprints in the hope of proving that Gates was present at the property before Laverty disappeared.

Ted Hastings and Steve Arnott call Gates in for questioning on his relationship with Laverty. Gates confirms that Laverty was an old flame, but he denies all knowledge of the money laundering scam in which Jackie Laverty was involved.

Gates struggles when Arnott asks him how he managed to park his car on Laverty's drive unless she let him onto the property herself, a hesitation which Arnott suspects is a sign of guilt. As Arnott confronts Gates, it is described as over the top or him being desperate for a suspect. This evidence that led Arnott to confront him was to indicate he was at the victim’s house during their murder. Now Gates is no longer apart of investigating the Laverty case as Hastings had stated.

While looking at CCTV from the night of the murder of the two drug dealers, Kate Fleming finds video footage which suggests that the killers circulated the area in a car with false number plates until Cottan and Kapoor left. Meanwhile, Gates attempt to remove the only piece of evidence that shows he was at the crime scene. This was a whiskey glass. Fleming receives a call from uniform saying that the cloned car has been spotted, and Gates and Morton give chase.

During the pursuit, Gates is kidnapped by masked men and an evil child who threatens to frame him for Jackie's murder by handing over the knife with his fingerprints to the police unless he takes over her money laundering racket.

Sponsored Link

The last episode keeps its ending leaving audience with shock, yet it helps us develop our ideas to what really happened and as time passes AC-12 gets closer to the truth.

According to me the power in this week's episode lay almost entirely in the smaller moments: Steve Arnott's increasing lack of control in his conflict with Gates, the scene in the pub between the out-of-his-depth cop and his former colleague in terrorism, the weary look on Ted Hastings's face when he realized his protégé couldn't exit the interview gracefully.

THEME OF THE EPISODE

This episode of Line of Duty majorly showed Arnott's fall from grace as much as Tony Gates's and in this episode, we saw both men struggling to stay on the side of the angels. In many ways Arnott is the more compelling tale: he's a man who thought he had a clear understanding of right and wrong, but who in each episode finds that understanding tested just a little bit further.

HIGHLIGHTS of In the Trap

Some of the main scenes from this episode are listed as under:

The scene with Arnott’s former colleague was the best of the episode, demonstrating what each man had lost and still stood to lose, as well as raising questions about the nature of duty and the cost of Arnott's determination to tell the truth.

As for Gates, I think his trick with the glass was pretty smart, even if he ultimately caught the wrong traitor, but we also saw yet more evidence of bullying occurred when someone had placed a rat in Deepak’s drawer, similar to what happened to Arnott in his car.

It's also arguable that AC-12 has been extremely fortuitous with their timing. As they investigate, they find more than Gates misleading some of his statistics. This makes him more guilty. Since they've started watching, he's graduated to interfering with a murder scene, destroying evidence and now working for a local crime boss. It's amazing what an internal affairs investigation and a troublesome mistress can do to a man's control.

We learnt a little more about Gates and Jackie's past as he admitted that they'd been engaged at 25, although the rest of his story was an interesting intermingling of truth and lies. As Arnott has spoken to gates wife about his suspicious behavior Mrs. Gates is questioning her husband’s life outside the house.

Underpinning it all was the sense of Arnott's growing despair as he went from cocky and convinced to conflicted and deeply confused. By the time he texted Kate and Hasting before heading off in his car I was genuinely unsure as to whether he was quitting the job, the force, or life itself.

Hence, this episode raised the question: Did the final scenes of Arnott suggest that he's heading out of Birmingham or off to kill himself?

Sponsored Link