Channel 4 police thriller Suspect is heading back to our screens, with more death, drama and dark secrets to get stuck into.
It’s also promising change. Where James Nesbitt led the first season as grumpy cop Danny Frater, this time Anne-Marie Duff will be taking the reins as his ex-wife Susannah, who’s still struggling to cope after the death of her daughter Christina (Imogen King).
With the second season about to air, what better time to recap what unfolded in season one? While the first installment seemingly offered viewers a fairly wrapped-up conclusion to the murder case, the return of the show opens up brand new mysteries.
Spoilers ahead, so tread carefully.
When did it air?
The show first came out in June 2022, and is a remake of the Danish TV series Face to Face.
The protagonist
In season one, that would be Danny Frater (James Nesbitt). He’s a police detective who’s married to the job and who has a difficult home life as a result – very bog standard police detective behaviour.
As the series continues, his mental health starts to spiral, and by the end he’s hallucinating and condemned to a psychiatric facility. In season two, the main character will instead be his ex-wife Susannah, played of course by Duff.
What happens?
Series one of the show began with Danny attending a routine ID check on a young woman’s body – only to find out the body is that of Christina, his long-estranged daughter.
Pathologist Jackie (Joely Richardson) quickly determined that her death is a result of suicide, but Danny wasn’t convinced. And so he begins to track down the people that she spoke to before she passed away.
This forms the crux of the series: each of the show’s six episodes involves Danny confronting another person related to the case, from his boss Richard (Ben Miller) to his daughter-in-law Nicola (Niamh Algar), who he didn’t even realise existed before this point.
In the final episode, we find out that the guilty party is actually Jackie herself. Christina had discovered that Jackie had falsified an autopsy report for Danny’s ex police partner Ryan (Sam Heughan), with whom she’d been having an affair.
When Christina threatened to expose her (and began planning to visit her father Danny to tell him), Jackie drugged her and then staged her death to make it look like a suicide. As she was the one who conducted the autopsy, she was also able to cover her tracks.
However, Danny made the connection between the two when he spotted a torn wrapper on Jackie’s kitchen counter, and had a flashback to Christina’s apartment, where he previously saw part of the same wrapper containing the drugs Christina overdosed on.
Christina’s body had by this point been cremated, so any evidence linking Jackie to the crime had vanished. Desperate for answers, Danny took the law into his own hands and stabbed Jackie with a kitchen knife, killing her.
The series ended with him being loaded into the back of a police car, speaking to a hallucination of Christina. He tells her it’s over. Only for her to reply that nothing’s over, before dramatically vanishing.
Intriguing stuff – and though Christina’s murder has supposedly been avenged, we imagine that season two will uncover more to the story.
