This Passenger episode 5 recap contains spoilers... Riya was thrown off the scent last time, but she manages to track Nina Karlsson down in this episode, although the Swede can't tell her much about the Pangaea Initiative.
Elsewhere, we finally learn what happened the night Eddie Wells attacked Jim Bracknell, but Riya is shocked to learn the man she sent down might have been innocent all along!
Is Police Linda Chief Markel in on it all?
Riya speaks to Kane and asks why she found wire-cutters in the bins, which she’s particularly interested in given there was an enormous hole in Jim’s fence on the night Mehmet died. “You need evidence,” says Kane, which is when Riya whips out a draft copy of Mehmet’s suicide note she found in his lock-up and Katie’s bracelet, which Nish and Ali found in his farmhouse. Ooosh. She’s holding him on suspicion of Mehmet’s murder.
Later on she shares the news with Derek and then confronts Chief Markel about her new findings. “This town is crying out for truth” she says, but her boss disagrees and also gives the impression that she knows more about the strange goings-on than she’s letting on. “They don’t need to know what’s going on, until they need to know what’s going on!” Is Markel in on this whole thing?
It seems all she cares about is that Best Kept Village Certificate and she calls a village meeting at the carvery to make sure they win it, although we’re not sure many of her fellow residents share her passion.
How much does Kane know about the Pangaea Initiative?
In hospital, the doctors say they found a substance that causes respiratory problems and hyper-activity in the prefrontal cortex (that’s the part of the brain that regulates fear apparently) in John's system. When Riya arrives to talk to him he tells her he “saw things”, but the doctor makes her leave when he starts coughing.
Elsewhere, the pathologist tells Riya that Mehmet’s cause of death was probably drowning, with his lungs containing traces of a black liquid. He agrees to test it for her “like, yesterday.”
Meanwhile at the Bread Factory, Katie has a blazing row with the girl John went home with, yet soon discovers he didn’t actually cheat on her, which probably won’t make her feel great about all those nasty things she said to him in front of everyone.
At the police station's holding cell, Riya reveals that Manchester Met have discovered his DNA on Mehmet’s body and he will likely be charged with his murder. He tells her he just wanted a quiet life, but “people put seeds in your head and push you down roads you didn’t want to go down.” It’s not difficult to see who he might be talking about here.
“I’ll get you out,” Derek tells him as he’s loaded into the police van. “This is my out!” comes the response from his younger brother. How much does Kane know about the Pangaea Initiative? Either way, we’d be very worried if we were Derek.
What has Nina Karlsson been hiding?
Back at the garage, Riya and Jakub are about to get down to it, when they’re once again interrupted by Nick who says his mum’s had a turn and he needs her help. However, when she gets there we can’t help but think it’s a pretext because he's made dinner and confesses that he’s “still in love with her". This guy!
Whether that cuts any mustard with Riya remains to be seen, but for now she heads back to Jakub’s to ruminate on her work, before heading off to see Keith the pathologist, who says the substance in Mehmet’s lungs was Skerameen (we have no idea how to spell that btw) otherwise known as ‘Devil’s Door’. As a plant it’s completely harmless, but if turned into a gas it can be terrifying, igniting people’s worst fears. “You become so consumed with anxiety, that it cripples you.” That's obviously why everyone uses those gas masks.
A trip to the hospital reveals there was another patient admitted with the same substance in her blood. “The one and only Nina Karlsson,” says Riya.
Back at Claire’s farm, Riya finally gets the truth out of Nina Karlsson, who’s arrived in Chadder Vale from Sweden. “We get told to say we came to see the Tree of Good Hope in the paperwork,” she says cryptically. “When you sign, you sign.” She says the Devil’s Door was presented to her and admits she’d been in contact with Mehmet, but apart from that she refuses to talk about the conspiracy she’s obviously been a part of.
Meanwhile, Nish is playing Passenger at home when he discovers some sort of note stashed in the game. “What have you been hiding,” he wonders.
Did Jakub attack Jim?
At the Wells house, Jo tells Eddie the other night meant nothing to her and they have no future together, before Katie tells her “it’s not dad I’m afraid of, it’s you. I want more than Chadder Vale.” Harsh!
Later that day, Jim brings the bag of cash he found on his doorstep (which he assumed was guilt money from Jo Wells) and throws it back at her. We very much doubt that's Jo's money though. After all she said she had to save up for two years to buy a Punto earlier in the series! But where did the cash come from?
Meanwhile her sister Lily is helping Mehmet’s mum at the chip shop and goes to her old friend’s room, where she finds a letter from Pangaea. When Mehmet’s mum catches Lily going through her son’s things she chucks her out and she makes her way down to the playground where her dad’s smoking cigarettes. “I wish you were dead,” she tells him. “You ruined my life.”
Eddie says he wants to show her something in the woods and takes her to a lake they used to come to when she was little. Lily’s scared and calls her mum, who’s given a lift to the woods by Jim as she was returning his cash when her daughter called...
When Jo and Lily find Eddie, he’s walking across the frozen lake (the one we heard about on the radio at the start of the first episode). Jo and Lily beg him to come off the ice before Jim turns up to try and bring him back. Yet he marches off towards the centre of the lake and soon falls through into the water below. “This is what monsters deserve!” he says before disappearing, yet Jim saves his life.
Later on Jim tells Riya he did it because he still wants an explanation from Eddie, before telling her about the cash, which gets her thinking…
We’ll come to that later though because it looks like we’re finally going to find out what crime Eddie committed five years ago. It seems Jim was attacked from behind by someone with a bottle one night. He saw Eddie at the other end of the street just before the assault, yet he didn’t actually see who did it.
“This money is from someone who feels guilty about this!” says Riya, before pointing out the oil stains on the banknotes. Does this mean Eddie is innocent and that Jakub attacked Jim? Riya heads to the garage to find out…
