YMMV / A Touch of Frost

• Adaptation Displacement: The series was much better known than the much darker novels by R D Wingfield that it was based on.
• Complete Monster:
  • "No Other Love": Captain Charlie Lawson is a retired military man and a dominating patriarch, whose appearance of seeming just a stuffy controlling old man hides his true, monstrous nature. He has abused his son Peter for years, terrifying Peter well into his adulthood, while also regularly raping his granddaughters, having done so since they were in their preteens. Driving the oldest Joanna to run away, he started raping his middle granddaughter Rachel, getting her pregnant before sixteen, while waiting for his youngest, Suzanna, to come of age to rape her too. Captain Lawson kept his family under control through fear, threatening to kill them if they told anyone the truth, except for his wife, who was in denial. Fearing the police investigation may be enough for Peter to break, Captain Lawson murders him. Upon Inspector Frost realizing the truth, Captain Lawson holds him at gunpoint. Treating everything up to this point as a game, he proves to have no remorse for his crimes against his family. Intending to kill Frost, DS Clive Bernard walks in at the wrong moment and Captain Lawson shoots him. Inspector Frost stated that at heart Lawson was just a sick and weak man, who controlled and abused others just because he couldn't cope with never being anything more than that.
  • "Held in Trust": Anton Caldwell is a psychopathic sexual predator. Freshly released from prison for sex offences, Caldwell hatches a plan with two pedophiles to abduct and rape children in the area. Kidnapping a local boy named Bobby Palmer, Caldwell bludgeons one of his accomplices to death when they grow uneasy with the plan, before running him over multiple times with his own vehicle. Along with his surviving accomplice, they abuse Palmer so severely that he dies. When he is arrested and interrogated, Caldwell threatens to find and rape DS Reid's children. After being released from custody, Caldwell tries to forcibly abduct another child and boasts that he was going to teach the child what "real love" meant, provoking an enraged Frost into punching him. Facing life imprisonment, Caldwell attempts to blackmail Frost by threatening to tell his superiors about the assault, destroying Frost's career if he doesn't give him a lighter sentence. Openly proud of his depraved nature, Caldwell was considered by Frost to be one of the worst people he ever dealt with.
  • "Near Death Experience": Bill Ford, initially appearing to be a gentle and pious individual and a caring relative, is actually a brutal psychosexual Serial Killer responsible for murdering five women. Using his job in construction to find attractive middle-aged women and get a copy of their keys, Ford would break into their homes, he would latch their hands and ankles together, degrade and even lightly cut his victims, and then stab them to death. Afterwards, he took a small lock of their hair and would set off the burglar alarm to ensure someone would find his handywork. Breaking into the home of his sister-in-law Lucy, he smashes his own fifteen-year-old niece Helen's head against a wall, critically injuring her, before murdering Lucy in his usual manner. During the police investigations, he murdered a seventh victim. Upon discovering Martine Philips was helping the police, Ford attacked her, gloating they couldn't stop him, only sparing her because as she didn't fit his pattern and so he wouldn't get pleasure from her death. Attempting to kill his eighth victim and stumbling into Frost's trap, a deranged Ford stabs him. Captured, he reveals his belief that attractive women rejected nice guys like him, so "...you show them BITCHES what a man can do..." A twisted mixture of ego, hypocrisy, misogyny, and brutality, Ford was one of the vilest people Frost ever faced.
• Moment of Awesome: There have been many great moments but the end of Held In Trust is probably one of the best moments of crime drama history. Jack catches a paedophile and saves a young boy and the paedophile whispers in Jack's ear that it's a shame that he won't get to show the boy what real love is. Driven into a fury, Jack punches the man square in the face. Later, when Mullet drags Jack to his office, Mullet tells Jack that the other officers present claim to have seen nothing and Caldwell is willing to drop the charges against Jack if the police give him a lighter sentence. Jack then openly admits to it, throwing away his recent promotion and almost certainly ending his career with the police, telling Mullet that he would rather lose everything than let Caldwell ever walk free. Jack, regretting nothing, then clears his desk and walks out to a round of applause from his fellow officers. Thankfully, Frost would be reinstated several months later after Caldwell is murdered in prison.
• Strawman Has a Point: Mullet's complaints aren't always baseless; a good example appears in Appendix Man where Jack not only manages to lose one highly critical case file due to sloppiness but an entire shelf full of them. He doesn't get them back either.
• Tear Jerker: Frost after his wife dies telling Shirley how he planned to leave her but she got ill.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The treatment of Down's syndrome person Billy Conrad in "Appropriate Adults" is hard to watch nowadays, with him being referred to as the Mental, a retard, mentally subnormal and with the social worker there to look after him treated as an inconvenience by everyone other than Frost and George. Also, despite recognising early on that he has a young mental age and is easily distressed, the new DCI runs him through a confrontational interview in a way that was always going to force a false confession from him. It can be slightly justified by tensions running extremely high given how they had a murdered (possibly molested) child on their hands, and the DCI and Mullet clearly felt extremely guilty about it once Frost had found the truth, but one would hope that this isn't how it would go today. (Though sadly incidents do occur occasionally.)
  • "Unknown Soldiers" is basically the British equivalent of a don't ask, don't tell story. Needless to say that attitudes towards homosexuality have done a complete flip since then.

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