Okay, so you're starting to see a pattern develop with the whole 'death' thing. After all, you're watching City Homicide, not City Just Making Off With a Few Knick Knacks and the Priceless Picassos. Dead bodies, an investigation, etc, etc... by now you get how we operate. But the scale of the murders is something else in this episode. You know something awful is about to happen, the masks are creepy, the absence of speech is unnerving and the guns are plain old dangerous. But when you find out they were all killed - all five - it's shocking. You were holding out hope for the boy to be spared, at least.

The challenge for us was to give the opening scenes emotional impact and entice you with intrigue, even though you know something terrible is about to happen. In this instance, the script for the home invasion scene was left deliberately bare - there's hardly any dialogue. Layered over the horrific action is this mournful, mysterious music which seems to draw upon knowledge of the deaths to come. Music is an incredibly powerful tool for creating emotional atmosphere and although you'd be a lazy scriptwriter if you relied on it every time, in this case it pushed the scene to a place where dialogue would have seemed insensitive or inadequate.

There's another sequence in this episode where we used music to convey information which couldn't be done through the script. It's the scene where Jennifer and Simon search the Deerborne's boat looking for 'the impossible'. We wanted to convey the stop-start nature of a search, the way detectives have to ask themselves questions over and over again, and the sheer inexhaustible grind of legwork during an investigation. Sure we could have had Jennifer sit down on that deck and say 'Whew! This has taken us hours!' or direct Simon to sigh and scratch his head quizzically as he searches. But, number 1, cheese-a-rama. And number 2, the funky music conveys this so much better.

Poor Duncan. We gave him some grieving space in this episode, rather than bring him back straight away. But when he re-connects with Matt at the very end of the episode, you kinda think, well, maybe he'll make it through all right. And yes, it's okay, you can have a little cry for all Claire's designer frocks that ended up in the charity bin.

Oh Simon. His cool definitely took a beating when Sparkes popped up out of nowhere. Get the impression Sparksey was waiting around in there just hanging out to emerge at the moment of maximum impact? To quote the man himself... pure evil. So Si, from now on you're going to check they're not married before you shag them, right?

COMING UP: Jarvis is threatening to bring the full might of Ethical Standards down on Duncan (basically, he's going to kill his career with bureaucracy and then some) as pay back for the free nose job Duncan gave him outside the morgue the night Claire was killed. Wolfie and the rest of the team have their hands full with the Feds who are involved in the death of a young refugee.
The Creative Team, CITY HOMICIDE