'Unforgotten' Recap: Season 6 Episode 1

Unforgotten is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous and following episodes and previous seasons.
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Months after the detective Jess James discovered that her husband cheated on her with her sister, Jess’ suspicion is raised by a red thread on her husband’s coat. The fact that he has made her a nice dinner makes her even more nervous – he never cooks for her. So when she gets a call from work even though it’s after hours, she takes it and leaves Steve and his dinner cold to follow a lead.

Bones from a human torso have been found in Whitney Marsh. A rod for scoliosis along the spine suggests the remains are from the past half-century, while cut marks on some bones suggest the body was dismembered. Jess and her colleague Sunny order the marsh swept for more remains.

When Jess returns home, she finds her portion of dinner in the dog’s bowl. She tries to unlock Steve’s phone, but his code has been changed. Her sister’s birthday is coming up, and her mom urges Jess to celebrate with the family, but she hasn’t forgiven Debbie yet.

Whitney Marsh was last drained in 2009 for a development, but the contractor went bankrupt and it was never built. The marsh was re-flooded two years later – so the bones likely ended up in the marsh after that, since they would probably have been easily spotted on dry land.

The police sweep finds a human leg wrapped in trash bags. Those plastic layers, along with the marsh conditions, have preserved the leg remarkably well in a sort of mummification. It appears to be from a man, and was definitely sawed off a body. The victim was approximately 5’8” and between 40 and 60 years old. A puncture wound in the upper thigh was likely the cause of death. The body was dismembered after death.

DNA from the leg and the spine identify the victim as Gerard Cooper. He was reported missing on February 24, 2021, by his wife Juliet Cooper. Although his body was never found (clearly), the investigation eventually concluded that he died by suicide by jumping into the Thames. But the officer who led the investigation is now in prison on corruption charges – and was put there by Sunny during a previous cold case. It’s Ram Sidhu, one of a number of young police graduates involved in a death that Sunny investigated.

Juliet Cooper and her daughter Taylor have yet to recover from Gerard’s death. Taylor is getting into fights at school with girls who joke about the suicide, and Juliet wants her to try going to therapy again even though she hated her first attempt. Juliet offers to do joint therapy with her, and Taylor eventually accepts – reluctantly.

Juliet has her own issues. She’s a professor, and a student has just filed a complaint against her. The young woman complained that the reading list for one of Juliet’s courses had too many white authors, so Juliet lent her two books on the subject by writers of color, including one with a provocative title. The student, who is white, claims she was traumatized by the title and didn’t receive proper warning about it. She wants an apology, which Juliet agrees to give, while the union wants Juliet to attend a microaggression course, which she adamantly refuses to do.

Marty Baines has also lost a father. He goes to the seaside in Kent and drops roses into the water on his father’s birthday, telling him sorry. He lacks social skills, weirding out people waiting in line for ice cream with him. He attends a mental health clinic, but has forgotten his appointment, to his distress. When he arrives late after a reminder call from his mother, he runs there and manages to reschedule, to his relief.

His mother is ill and homebound, reliant on Marty for food. But there’s little to eat in the house, which is stacked high with piles of junk. Marty spends his evenings chatting online about conspiracies with an incel forum.

The people on the forum might be fans of the Britannia News Channel, a right-wing outlet for which Melinda Ricci anchors a provocative segment in which she attacks immigrants, among others. She’s based in County Cork, Ireland, where her fiance is striving mightily to regain the ability to walk after an accident. He wants to walk down the aisle at their wedding, but is pushing himself so hard that Melinda worries about his heart. His doctor tells her that he will probably always need a wheelchair; Melinda needs to help him understand that.

The Britannia News Channel stirs animus against people like Asif Syed, an Afghan immigrant who is studying for a UK citizenship exam. He worked for a Western government in Afghanistan and seems to have been betrayed by his partners – just like a man he knows who worked as a translator and was killed as a result.

He picks up a friend, Hassan, who has just arrived illegally in the UK from Afghanistan in a shipping container. Hassan and other immigrants were let out of the container near a gas station, where Asif was waiting to collect Hassan. The other immigrants got into a waiting van together – and were spotted by police as Asif drove himself and Hassan away.

Hassan wants to do things the right way and formally apply for asylum, since he will be killed if he returns to Afghanistan. He doesn’t want to end up as a delivery driver, like a prospective landlord who was a doctor back in Afghanistan. Hassan has also qualified to be a doctor but hasn’t had the chance to practice due to the instability in Afghanistan.

But Asif doesn’t trust the process or Westerners any more. He risked his life for them and still ended up in a detention center before making his way to England and trying to build a new life.