DCI Banks Season 5 Episode 1 Set Up His Final Case

Here’s how the DCI Banks season 5 premiere set up its titular detective’s final case. British crime drama DCI Banks stars Stephen Tompkinson (Brassed Off) as Alan Banks – a detective working with a Yorkshire police force who together with his colleagues DS Annie Cabbot (Andrea Lowe), DI Helen Morton (Caroline Catz) and DS Ken Blackstone (Jack Deam) solves the grisly murders that beset his local beat.

DCI Banks’ fifth season was also the crime drama’s last and it departed from previous seasons in several ways. While the first three seasons of the show were based on books in British-Canadian crime writer Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series, season 5 – like season 4 before it – featured original stories penned specifically for the program. And, whereas previous seasons were made up of several standalone double episodes, season 5 was the first to feature an ongoing story arc weaved throughout its six-episode run.

The show’s last outing has also been described as its grittiest ever and DCI Banks season 5 episode 1 certainly set the tone. The premiere sees Banks and his team investigate the brutal murder of a drug dealer named Damon Horsley (Darragh Mortell) whose body was found at a shrine to a local girl who committed suicide a few months earlier. Initially, they wonder if the father of the girl – who apparently bought drugs off Damon – might be involved in his death somehow but are able to rule him out as a suspect.

After pursuing various leads, DCI Banks and his team discover that Damon owed a sizable sum of money to a seemingly respectable property developer named Steve Richards (Shaun Dooley, The Stranger). It turns out Richards is a crime boss involved in drug dealing, prostitution, and money laundering and sent his henchman Charlie (Emmanuel Ighodaro, Krypton) to collect the debt. They also find evidence that suggests Steve’s teenage daughter Kat (Rosie Sheehy, Chernobyl) was in a relationship with Damon, giving him two pretty good motives for killing him.

DCI Banks season 5 episode 1 also revealed this wasn’t the titular detective’s first run in with Steve Richards. Banks had witnessed Richards get off on a double murder charge he knew he was guilty of years earlier and the detective is hellbent on putting the man behind bars this time around. Unfortunately, just as Banks was about to question Richards’ daughter, she too was found dead. As Banks and his team soon found out, the case would get more complicated as the rest of DCI Banks season 5 played out.