Unforgotten Season 6 Premiere Ending Explained: How Ram’s shocking return ties into the Cooper Murder Case

Unforgotten Season 6 begins with a clean hook and a hard turn. Unforgotten Season 6 opens on a spine dredged from Whitney Marsh, a forensic sweep that screams dismemberment, and a DNA hit that names Gerrard “Gerry” Cooper, a husband declared a suicide in 2021.

The case lands with extra weight for Jess James (Sinéad Keenan) and Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar). Sunny helped jail former DCI Ram Sidhu in Season 4. Jess is inheriting a file that may have been signed off on by a corrupt officer.

Creator Chris Lang and director Andy Wilson keep the camera on process: a scoliosis rod that fixes the timeframe, clean saw marks that indicate post-mortem cut-up, and a likely femoral-artery wound that points to rapid blood loss before disposal. Then the final shot reframes everything: Ram appears in Ashbourne Prison, looping the past back into the present.

The question Unforgotten Season 6 leaves at the door is clear: to solve Cooper, will the unit need Ram’s intel, or will they have to prove Ram buried the truth?

Unforgotten Season 6 premiere ending explained: Ram's prison reveal and how it ties the Cooper murder back to 2021

The premiere structures its last minutes as a mirror. Early in the hour, Jess and Sunny confirm the spine and the leg belong to Gerry Cooper and that the 2021 inquiry ended with a “suicide by Thames” finding without a body. In the closing beat, the mirror flips: the officer who led that inquiry is shown behind glass- Ram Sidhu, now an inmate at Ashbourne Prison.

The shot does two things at once for Unforgotten Season 6. First, it instantly taints the old verdict. Any decision touched by Ram must be checked for shortcuts or favors. Second, it sets a practical path for Episode 2: reopen every line of inquiry Ram closed, then press him for what he knew and who he protected.

The hour also seeds why the team thinks Cooper was killed and then dismembered elsewhere. Scene work makes that explicit. Sunny remarked,

“This is a weird thought experiment, for the record. Not sure, but I do think they wouldn’t have walked into the marsh. Too easy to get caught.”

before adding,

“200 yards in either direction?”

to map the likely throw radius. Jess stated,

"Yeah. And I don’t think most people can throw body parts very far. It’s hard to dismember a body, so it’s not like we’re talking about little pieces. Arms are probably the lightest… how far can you throw one of them?"

She also added,

“So let’s search 200 yards in either direction and like 40 feet out just to be safe. See what we find.”

The ending uses that legwork to justify the pivot: a homicide masked as a suicide, now tied to a cop with form.

The Cooper file and the Whitney Marsh clues: What Unforgotten Season 6 confirms in Episode 1

Unforgotten Season 6 lays out a simple, verifiable chain. Gerry Cooper was reported missing on February 24, 2021. Nobody was found, yet the case was closed as a suicide. In the present, a spine with a scoliosis rod is recovered from Whitney Marsh. A human leg is then found, wrapped in plastic trash bags that preserved tissue.

Forensics estimate a male, roughly 5’8”, aged 40-60, with a small puncture in the upper thigh that likely severed a major artery. The cut marks on bone indicate post-mortem dismemberment; the absence of marsh footprints implies an off-site cut-up.

The geography matters, too. The marsh was drained between 2009 and 2011 and then re-flooded, which narrows the dump window and makes a recent homicide more plausible.

Unforgotten Season 6 also maps the family context that will feed the motive. Juliet Cooper is still pushing through professional trouble and parenting a grieving teen. Taylor remarked,

“She made a joke about you and dad… she understood why dad died by suicide. Happy?”

Those lines place humiliation, anger, and rumor into the household timeline in ways that could matter when the team reconstructs Gerry’s final weeks.

Ram Sidhu’s history and three working theories on his link to Cooper (no spoilers)

Ram’s Season 4 arc already explains why Sunny distrusts him: a pattern of corruption and interference around a body and criminal networks. Unforgotten Season 6 uses that history as a pressure point. Three clean theories follow from Episode 1’s facts:

Bad paperwork: During the corruption era, Ram may have allowed a suicide call to stand without the evidence threshold. The motive here is career protection, close the case, minimize scrutiny.

Protection racket: Ram could have shielded someone in Cooper’s circle, personal or criminal and steered the investigation toward Thame's “suicide.” Phone logs, officer notebooks, and CCTV gaps from February-March 2021 would test this.

Prison pipeline: From inside Ashbourne, Ram may know who moved body parts or who panicked when a “missing” man resurfaced as evidence. Interview strategy is key: isolate Ram’s incentives, then verify anything he offers against scene-of-crime data.

Unforgotten Season 6 threads parallel suspect lanes that will likely intersect the Cooper timeline. A media firebrand in Cork, a struggling caregiver-son, and an immigration storyline widen the social map. Even these beats seem usable evidence. A rehab doctor stated,

“I think it’s likely that he’ll need a wheelchair for the rest of his life."

It's a line that quietly timestamps physical limits around one character’s movements. Viewers should expect the unit to cross-check travel, medical appointments, and digital footprints against disposal windows at Whitney Marsh.

Unforgotten Season 6 uses Ram’s return to convert a cold “suicide” into a live murder inquiry. The ending doesn’t just tease a cameo. It reopens a 2021 decision with a named accountability target.

If Episode 1 is the blueprint, the next steps are procedural: rebuild Cooper’s last month, re-interview Juliet and Taylor, pull the original officer actions from the file, then sit down with Ram, on tape and test whether he’s a witness, an accessory, or simply the rotten hinge that let this case go cold.

Stay tuned for more updates.