Burton’s Sam Ryan locked horns with her successor and current queen of CSI, Emilia Fox’s Nikki Alexander

Silent Witness marked its 25th series by bringing back Amanda Burton’s Sam Ryan after 17 years, in the first-ever encounter with her successor at the forensics lab, Emilia Fox’s Nikki Alexander. In superhero (and gender-reversed) terms, it was Batman meets Superman.

Sam was now the co-founder with her husband, Jomo, of a company contracted by the government to implement a Europe-wide health passport plan (post-Brexit Brussels agreed to that?). She reached out to Nikki after Jomo was wounded and the health secretary killed by a gunman at the scheme’s launch.

The initial Sam-Nikki encounter was guardedly polite, although Sam’s interference while Nikki conducted the subsequent post-mortem led the latter to snap that “there’s supervising and there’s taking over”. Indeed, the whole case had begun to “smell off”, as Nikki’s colleague and now lover Jack (David Caves) put it – especially after a key witness was shot through her hotel bedroom window.

Soaps traditionally mark anniversaries with a disaster. Silent Witness did so by wandering into Line of Duty territory, with murky conspiracies and ruthlessly efficient assassins. Even Sam Ryan seemed to have something to hide.

Instead of “who is H?”, a question mark hovered over Tom Faulkner, a mysterious character known to both Sam and Nikki. Unlike the interminable H question, however, Faulkner’s significance will be revealed at the start of episode two.

I can only guess how much excitement was generated among the faithful by this coming together of past and present queens of CSI. It was meant as a special treat but I imagine some fans wished they’d foreshorten the excursion into Jed Mercurio territory and focus more on such familiar matters as bullet trajectories, cutting up cadavers and finding DNA in unlikely places.

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