Desperate to get Assane to stop harassing him, Dumont points him in the direction of Fabienne Bériot, a journalist who had come close to exposing Hubert Pellegrini's crimes in 1996, but had been blacklisted after Hubert and his lawyers hit her with a record defamation lawsuit. Fabienne has essentially been a recluse since then, living with only her dog J'accuse for company, but after some initial reluctance she agrees to team up with Assane after he tells her the story of what happened to his father. The two steal a tape from the offices of The Objector, the newspaper where Fabienne had worked, which contains video of Hubert selling weapons to a group of Malaysian terrorists.
Assane plans to reveal the tape to the French public via a disguised appearance on the talk show The Other Edition. However, Hubert, who is friends with the show's host, successfully gets all of the incriminating portions of the footage wiped, much to Assane's fury. Remembering her earlier experience at Luxembourg gardens, Juliette Pellegrini calls her father and tells him that she thinks that Assane is the one causing them trouble. Hubert instructs his henchman Léonard Koné, who has been tailing Fabienne, to make her give up Assane's location. When she refuses to do so, Léonard kills her, and a horrified Assane returns to find her body hanging from a noose.
Meanwhile, Guédira has begun piecing together the links between Dumont's kidnapping, the Louvre heist, and the original 1995 theft of the necklace. Nervous that Guédira is going to discover his past corruption, Dumont removes him from the case of the necklace theft. As a result, Guédira grows increasingly skeptical of his commissioner's trustworthiness.
Episode credits:
Tropes that appear in this episode:
- Cane Fu: Assane uses a cane to beat up Hubert Pellegrini's henchmen while in disguise as ageing whistleblower "Salvator."
- Dying Moment of Awesome: Fabienne: "A good journalist never reveals her sources..."
- Enemy Eats Your Lunch: While Dumont is eating breakfast at a café Assane appears suddenly at his table and announces his presence by biting into his piece of bread and jam. Assane then dips it into his coffee, to deepen the insult.
- Foreshadowing: The fact that Assane discovers Fabienne's body in exactly the same state that his father was found in prison provides an early clue that Babakar's death wasn't a suicide, but rather he was murdered by Léonard.
- Friend Versus Lover: Although Assane claims that he's happy that Claire is trying to move on from him with a new partner, he's pretty clearly jealous, to the point where Raoul calls him out on it.Raoul: Stop pretending like you don't care. It's pissing me off.
- He Knows Too Much: Dumont kicks Guédira off of the necklace case because the younger detective is beginning to piece everything together about his corruption, giving him a whole load of paperwork to complete instead.
- Late to the Tragedy: Assane returns to Fabienne's apartment just after she is visited by Léonard, and finds her hanging from a noose.
- Manipulative Editing: Hubert manages to have the footage on Fabienne's videotape doctored so that it looks like he's refusing to sell weapons to the Malaysian terrorists. When the tape is played on air, Assane is horrified.
- Pac Man Fever: Assane is seen playing video games with Raoul. The footage onscreen is Horizon Zero Dawn, a real game, but the show acts like it's a multiplayer game (it's not), and at the end of the scene Raoul claims that he headshotted Assane's character, despite the footage on the screen not being split-screen.
- Terrible Interviewees Montage: When the police try to interview those who had seen Assane personally, they wind up getting wildly different physical descriptions of him, much to their dismay.
- Tragic One-Shot Character: Fabienne has her career and journalistic reputation ruined by Hubert, is briefly revitalized by her teamup with Assane, but is killed off at the end of the episode.
- Villain with Good Publicity: After Assane leaks the allegations about Hubert being indirectly responsible for the 1996 Malaysian terrorist attack, Hubert's way of deflecting scrutiny is to give a press conference in which he denies all accusations and professes his Patriotic Fervor for France.
