"You're perfectly safe, my dear..."
This episode, while perhaps a little slow, is splendidly and uncannily directed and uses a simple central idea- a family holiday goes wrong when a hitchhiker attacks Martin, but turns out to be his doppelganger- to maximum effect, wringing huge amounts of tension out of whether the dead man or the survivor is Janet's husband.
It helps that so many of the cast, including the ward sister, are pleasingly sinister, as is the way everything is shot. The slow pace allows the episode to wallow in the uncanny mood and Janet's unease. The hospital itself is creepy, and from the moment Janet wakes everything feels off-kilter.
Anna Calder-Marshall is superb in the central role, but Gary Raymond is equally superb in a necessarily ambiguous part where you are never quite sure whether he's evil or not. Then there's Pauline Delaney, who is far too good here for me never to have heard of.
A quietly excellent episode.
