I was hoping for a slow, serene re-introduction to Broadchurch. Remember how the first series began, with that long tracking shot down the sunny street? It had a warm, pastoral flavour, like a Thomas Hardy scene made cheerful and nudged into the 21st century. Well, it was cheerful until Pauline Quirke's character came into view and scowled.

I wanted Series 2 to get off to the same start, as there was no point going in all guns blazing, shocking and stressing us when we're still ringing with the brilliance of the last series. Go in quietly, Broadchurch. Win us over afresh.

It did start quietly although not with cheery street scenes, but with Alec stirring from a silent vision of someone drowning. He awakes to neck his medication, ignore his phone calls and snap at journalists, telling them to 'stop taking the arsehole pills'. A quiet, but surly start.

And what of Ellie? She's back in uniform, stopping apologetic drivers on empty country roads. A demotion then, but was it a compulsory move or a self-inflicted penance?

The programme leaps onwards, giving us glimpses of Joe in jail, trying to pray. Then we quickly move to the Latimer family, seeing them being busy, talkative, anything to avoid stopping to think of their horrors.

With these brief, quickly shifting opening scenes there was the deliberate feel of storylines being grasped and revived from the first series, though the show's fanatical fans will hardly need such reminders.

Soon the various strands unite, as Joe Miller, Alec, the Reverend and the Latimers converge on court for the sentencing.

Ellie enters the courtroom alone, after everyone else is seated, prompting Beth to wonder that she 'had the nerve'. With her murderer husband about to emerge into the dock, we're expecting Ellie and Joe to be the awful focus of the scene, but it veers away suddenly as Hardy is disturbed by a frantic, frightened woman called Claire. 'I think he's back and I think he's looking for me,' she tells him as he urges her to stay calm.

Then the scene is wrenched away from every other character as Joe Miller stands up to plead not guilty, horrifying and tormenting the Latimers all over again. However, his reasoning for this doesn't go beyond 'I don't wanna go to prison.' Well, he'll need to present his defence lawyers - and the viewers - with something more substantial than that.

Ellie is appalled that Joe is dragging out the horror. 'How is this my life now?' she pleads, reminding us this isn't just a crime drama, but unfurls into personal lives and torments. And she is magnificent. We see her in therapy, sitting in an armchair, dressed in an old jumper, mopping at her face with a handkerchief as she spits out that she wants to kill her husband with a hammer then, in the next weeping breath, say she wishes her son was back with her.

But when she emerges from her therapy, Alec is waiting in the street. He says he needs her help and, instantly, we've shifted again. From tears and reflection, to the cops speeding off in their car on a new case.

And the new case is a hush-hush one. Alec has been hiding Claire in a 'sort of' witness protection. What was she witness to, asks Ellie. As we were all expecting by now, she was a witness in Alec's infamous Sandbrook case and he has sworn to protect her. Ellie is furious at this bending of rules and procedure and flames up into her old, peppery self, calling him a 'wanker' and grabbing her coat. But he needs her help, and she hesitates.

With Joe scrambling to stay out of jail, and intent on forcing the family to sit through a trial, and with her son parted from her, and the locals eyeing her with hostility, it seems poor Ellie has two choices: to sit in the therapist's chair and cry, or to throw herself back into work with Alec. The fact that it may be off-the-record work is perhaps just what she needs to begin to heal.

But healing will not be easy, as the episode ends with Danny Latimer's body being exhumed on the callous orders of the defence team with Ellie being the target of the Latimers' hurt and rage.

So it did get off to a slow start, but then the pace accelerated until we were dazzled by the speeding subplots, with witness protection, the Sandbrook case, the trial and the introduction of the two fearsome lawyers. Yet, as ever, the best thing in the show is the tight, aggravating, but oddly kind relationship between Hardy and Miller.