Trigger Point has always felt like Vicky McClure’s show, and Trigger Point Season 3 unequivocally proves that. The ITV series comes to BritBox for another round of bomb-disposal drama, but it’s McClure’s character Lana Washington who’s more explosive than any of the devices. Season 3—the first without creator Daniel Brierley as a writer—feels like a soft reset for the project.
Perfectly timed as fans wait for the next series of Line of Duty, this cycle of Trigger Point is the tipping point for Lana, and for McClure’s performance as a result. This story couldn’t be told without the events of Season 1 and Season 2, as the audience sees all of that combined trauma finally start to catch up with Lana. She’s dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and suffering from tinnitus—which the show actually incorporates into its audio track so that viewers hear what she hears. McClure is excellent as Lana vacillates between that public toughness the viewer is so used to, and a growing vulnerability that she doesn’t know what to do with. Lots of crime dramas explore the idea of the toll that the job takes on its heroes, but McClure delivers one of the best portrayals of the challenge because her performance feels so raw and messy. It’s not simply angst; it has an element of chaos to it.
What propels the viewer through the season is Lana’s individual arc of who she is versus who she thinks she is, and if those two things will ever be the same. The bombing case of Season 3 continues to play with familiar genre concepts. The underlying story is not new to anyone who’s watched enough police shows, and stylistically there’s little new here either; Trigger Point still struggles with a painfully distracting underscore and moments where the camera gets too dramatic for its own good. The series would benefit from not using so many of those extreme close-ups and sharp angles. But the cliched visuals and some of the major plot points being easy to guess doesn’t make them any less tense to watch. Lead writer Chris Brandon and his team have at least created interesting ways to blow things up.
Primeval‘s Jason Flemyng arrives as the villain of the season, and while he’s not quite as good as Warren Brown in Season 1, he’s also limited by the interesting choice to keep his character enigmatic in the early going. On one hand, with an actor as well-known as Flemyng, the audience wants to see more of him right away; on the other, giving him shockingly few lines at the outset keeps the focus where it ought to be, which is on Lana and his potential victims. The audience is more in their shoes than they have been before, just because it takes that much longer to put together the big picture.
Trigger Point Season 3 also benefits from not having the personal melodrama that weighed down Season 2. Natalie Simpson returns as Helen Morgan, and she and Lana feel much more like equals now that there’s no love triangle in the way. The characters still butt heads, but there’s growth as well. In fact, it’s newly promoted Amir Batra who gets more of Lana’s ire. Batra replaces John Francis as the show’s resident authority figure, and while it’s a shame to lose an actor of Julian Ovenden’s talent, Maanuv Thiara slides easily into that new position. He keeps that balance between playing the oft-critical supervisor role, and not forgetting the history and respect that Batra has with Lana. The series may continue to have its ups and downs plot-wise, but it feels like the characters are finding new strides, actually having learned things from before. That makes Series 3 feel fresh even when the audience knows what’s coming.
BritBox viewers should also note that the ITV commercial bumpers in each episode have been left in, as was the case in previous seasons. The stream hasn’t frozen or gone dark; it just takes a pause. While this spoils the tension of Trigger Point Season 3 in a couple of places, maybe it’s also emblematic of the season. Lana would certainly benefit from taking a breath, but she’s not able—but also sometimes not willing—to do so.
Trigger Point Season 3 premieres June 18, 2026 on BritBox. Photo Credit: Courtesy of ITV.
Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.
