User Reviews

A belter. The episode starts with Frank being arrested for murder and then it flashes back to two days previously. The agency is contacted and Frank is persuaded to go on a Shakespeare ramble with some oddball characters. One of them gets murdered after arguing with the detective. Frank gets romantically involved with one of the walkers, and it is obvious she is the culprit as any romance for our detectives is surely doomed. That is probably my only gripe, it's too easy to guess who did it. Christopher Simon who plays Julian Hope looks so much like Gary Lineker I had to keep doing a double take.

Oh no, another revenge story. Okayyyy...

Well, the beginning does set up an interesting mystery, and it's clever the way the first scenes are presented out of sequence. The story quickly settles into a more straight-ahead format once the flashback recounting of events begins, but unfortunately it becomes very easy to guess where and with whom it's all going to end - virtually everything a certain character does telegraphs the person's eventual unmasking as the guilty party. And OK, the walk setting is imaginative, and the hikers are a reasonably colorful bunch, but still, when you get down to it, the resolution feels kind of "been there, done that". Even the element of Frank being a specific target of the villain's plot was already used in the second season episode "The Offered Fallacy".

The guest actors are all very good though, particularly Christopher Simon, Elizabeth Cadwallader and Yasmin Wilde. And Mark Benton gets an excellent showcase for his talents here - among many good moments, it's nice to actually see Frank going out on a date for once, short-lived though it is. "Time Decays" ultimately is a pleasantly diverting, if not especially remarkable, episode.