The drama of this episode is gripping, as the detectives investigate the murder of a boy whose skeleton was hidden behind a brick wall for 30 years. Watching it in the mindset of the time it was aired, it's a difficult but worthwhile challenge for both the detectives and the prosecutors.
Unfortunately the episode hinges on one witness recovering "repressed memories" of witnessing the murder as a child. At the time of airing, psychologists believed such memories were highly reliable, more so than conscious ones, and a number of criminal convictions were based on no other evidence than that. Then further research showed that repressed memories were in fact completely unreliable, almost always the product of suggestion by well-meaning but mistaken therapists, and those convictions were all overturned.
The prosecutors in the episode find independent evidence that the defendant was a child molester, and so while watching we want them to get him. But watching now, it's impossible not to realize that they had no genuine reason to believe he was guilty of that particular crime. So either our heroes sent an innocent (of that one crime anyway) man to prison, or they got lucky and had the right defendant but he probably got released when the repressed memory house of cards fell apart within a couple of years.
It's like watching a story where the solution to a mystery hinges on the flat earth theory being correct.
Review of In Memory Of
