What Dreams May Come True

"What Dreams May Come True" is the strangest hour of the fourth series — a story about a black-magic cult, an undercover journalist and a death that Bergerac cannot quite file away. It opens on a haggard man, Jerry Bruce, running through woodland and checking on a chapel before stepping into the road and being hit by a car. In hospital he fights the sedatives and tells the doctor he has damned him. During the night he screams, and the nurse finds him dead, his face fixed in horror. In his study, a man called Bart Bellow sits with a satisfied look.

Bergerac receives an anonymous call from a French woman — Helene Duvall, played by Maggie Mansfield — insisting Jerry's death was no accident: "They killed him." The dead man was a beach photographer with a business card, a burgled cottage and nothing else; an animal-rights activist who has been pestering the Bureau, a dog locked in a shed that catches fire, a black eye Helene claims came from a door. Brian Finch's script, directed by Ben Bolt, keeps the occult on the surface and the ordinary crimes underneath: Bellow, played by Andrew Burt with a cold, donnish certainty, runs a group that performs black-magic rites, and the dead man was in fact Frank Green, an undercover journalist who used Helene to get inside it.

The episode's engine is Bergerac's refusal to accept the supernatural explanation. Green died of heart failure, possibly stress; his cottage was stripped of anything identifying; he was taking amphetamines to stay awake, because, as Helene says, he knew something would come for him if he passed out. The climax is a lift shaft filling with smoke and a staircase fight with Bellow, who lunges at Bergerac and falls to his own death — and even then, Bergerac is troubled by the fire going out when Bellow died, until the experts explain that a sudden flash can use up all the oxygen.

It is a taut, slightly lurid hour that works because the series keeps its feet on the ground: the horror is real to the characters, but the answers are human. Bellow and his group killed Green and the activist, and would have killed Helene. The occult is the window dressing; the murders are the point. A confident, atmospheric entry that shows the fourth series could do menace without ever believing in it.