A dead body is found, wearing a Manchester United scarf. As the murder occurred a few days before a match between Manchester United and Manchester City, Gene immediately suspects football hooligans.
But, as has now become the norm, Sam disagrees. His point of view is that football-related violence rarely involves killing, and when it does, the victim is beaten up before hand. As there were no indications the victim had been beaten up, he doesn’t believe it was hooligans.
Sam goes to visit the family of the victim, and promises the son, Ryan that he’ll find his father’s murderer. So the story is probably going to go that Sam won’t catch the murderer and therefore appear to break his promise, but will end up catching him. The fact that I can predict the storyline this early on – does it mean I’ve watched too much TV?
In the morgue, Sam learns that the victim was killed by being stabbed in the back of the head by something serrated on one side but no more than three inches (about 7½ centimetres) long. That’s too small to be a knife, and both Sam and the coroner are baffled.
Amongst the items gathered at the crime scene, Sam finds blakeys (metal shoe sole protectors) with fibres that appear to match the carpet of the Trafford Arms, which is where the victim had been drinking the previous evening. As it’s a United supporters’ bar, Sam thinks that it’s unlikely any City supporters would have followed him from the bar, and therefore it wasn’t a football-related crime.
Sam suggests going undercover to try and find the murderer. Gene is reluctant for him to do so until he learns that the venue is a pub, in which case he decides that he’ll join Sam, with Annie their barmaid.
Of course, at some point there needs to be some TV-related weirdness, and this episode’s sequence occurs that night when the test card girl asks Sam why he promised Ryan. This is followed by the images from the woods yet again.
At the Trafford Arms, the three undercover officers experience a patchy start, but soon get into the swing of things. Sam spends some time speaking to one of the patrons in particular, a man by the name of Pete Bond.
At some point in the evening Sam goes outside for some air. There he sees Ryan fighting with his friend Wayne, whom Sam had met earlier.
Sam breaks up the fight and Wayne runs off. Ryan tells to Sam that the newspapers said that City supporters killed his father, and so he was taking out his frustrations on Wayne, who is a City supporter, even though there was no chance of him being involved.
Sam is forced to admit to Ryan that he doesn’t know who killed his father, leading Ryan to believe that Sam broke his promise. And so the first part of prediction has come true.
The search for the killer proves fruitless, although there is an incident close to the end of the evening when a confrontation occurs between Gene and a man named Malcolm Cox. Things are resolved without violence, but at one point Cox makes a fist and places a key between his knuckles.
The next morning, a dejected Sam goes to visit Ryan. Ryan mentions that he’s wearing his father’s scarf, and Sam is puzzled as they found a scarf with the body, but it couldn’t have been the victims.
Sam remembers two things from the previous evening. The first was that Annie said that Cox wore the same aftershave as Sam.
He asks Annie to smell the scarf that they found with the body, and Annie confirms that it smells like Sam and Cox. I'm a bit puzzled as Sam claims that he doesn’t wear aftershave, so I’m not quite sure what Annie smelled.
The other thing that Sam remembers is Cox placing a key between his knuckles. He realises that this could have been what killed the victim.
Chris finds out that Cox has previous convictions for assault, and so Sam and Gene bring him in. To Sam’s amazement, Cox reveals that Pete was actually the one behind it all.
Pete had wanted to get into a fight with the City fans but as no one was interested, he suggested beating up a United fan in order to make the other United fans incensed. Things went wrong though when Pete hit the victim with a key sticking through his fist, something which was his trademark, and the victim ended up dying.
They learn where the big fight between the City and United fans is set to take place, and a squad of police officers head there, armed with large blunt objects. The police manage to subdue the fans and, naturally, Sam is the one who ends up confronting Pete. Sam handcuffs him and takes away his ticket to the match, saying that Pete doesn’t deserve it.
Sam finds Ryan in the streets, tells him that he did keep his promise after all, and gives him the ticket. Ryan heads off to the match together with Wayne, the two of them having reconciled.
As the fans walk past Sam, he notices a young boy. He then hears a voice asking whether “Sam” is excited about the match. Before Sam can do anything else, he loses track of the boy in the crowd.
Obviously, the boy is meant to be Sam. He did mention earlier in the episode that he’d stopped going to matches round about “now” (i.e. 1973, although he covered up by saying that he meant this time of year).
This, combined with Sam meeting his mother in the last episode, establishes that two Sams do exist in 1973. So what will happen if they meet?
Will the space/time continuum be destroyed, will it bring Sam out of his coma (that is if he’s actually in one), or will nothing of the sort happen?