‘Criminal Record’ Flashback Episode Reveals How Hegarty ‘Broke’ Errol

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Criminal Record Episode 7 “The Sixty-Twos.”]

It takes until the penultimate episode for Criminal Record to reveal the events of the night that Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi) got that confession out of Errol Mathis (Tom Moutchi) for the murder of his girlfriend. But the events that lead to that are heartbreaking.

It was “always” the plan to wait until now to show that, executive producer Elaine Collins tells TV Insider. “When we talked about creating the series and when we were storylining it, we decided right at the beginning, okay, we’re going to have a bubble episode. And it was always going to be the penultimate episode, wasn’t it?”

Executive producer Paul Rutman confirms it was. “It felt like the right time. I think you go too soon, and you rob Hegarty of his mystery, and we want to keep the audience guessing about this character until the last frame of the show. And so it felt like the right time for him to kind of let drop and let us see him properly whilst holding it a little bit back,” he explains. “I hope it’s quite humanizing as well.”

Collins points out that with this flashback episode, the audience gets to see Hegarty “not through the lens of June,” since Cush Jumbo’s character, Detective Sergeant Lenker, doesn’t meet him until she starts looking into the case years later.

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The flashbacks show Hegarty’s battling problems with drinking and in his personal life, specifically about his daughter, but he presses Errol repeatedly until he gets his confession. Those scenes take place in two small spaces, an interrogation room and the apartment (including Hegarty bringing Errol back, without anyone else).

“I’ve never really noticed it like that,” remarks Moutchi. “And just a little nugget: It was cold in the interrogation room because it was an old police station and it was derelict a bit. So you really felt [it], and then I don’t even know if my lawyer’s here or if he’s not here. It felt really lonely. So it does feel like the walls were closing in. I wonder if the director did that on purpose.”

He adds that it took 15 hours to film one of the scenes. “It was in stages, and you had to stay in that emotion the whole day,” he recalls. “I tend to sign off when I go home. I can separate myself, but while you’re there, you have to stay in it. That was very taxing. And as much as they are words, I do think that they hold life. So when someone is saying something like that to you and you are saying it back, you go home and it’s playing in your head. I had to dissociate myself, but it was heavy.”

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It’s not until Hegarty plays Errol part of his interview with his stepson, Patrick, in which it sounds like he heard Errol fighting and possibly being violent with his mother, the victim, that he gets that confession.

Without that recording, “I don’t think” Hegarty would’ve gotten that confession, Rutman says. “I think he broke him. He turned Errol’s love for this kid, the best part of Errol into a weakness. I feel that’s particularly cruel.”

Adds Collins, “My own personal belief is that he absolutely believes that Errol is guilty. He needs to get there faster or he is going to walk. Everybody will feel differently, but my own personal feelings are that he doesn’t think he’s putting an innocent man away. He thinks he’s putting a guilty man away. So it is different shades of gray, I think, what’s going on.”

But with one episode left, there is, of course, more to the story. What do you think the finale will reveal?

Criminal Record, Finale, Wednesday, February 21, Paramount+