Avenge, O Lord

The fourth series ends with its darkest hour. "Avenge, O Lord" is a political assassination story with the island as a stage and a former SAS soldier as the assassin — and it leaves Bergerac doubting the institutions he works for. The premise is simple and cold: a foreign VIP is being flown into Jersey for two hours to sign a secret trade deal with the British government, represented by Sir Geoffrey Newton, a backbench MP with a law-and-order speech for every occasion. And a mercenary, Mick Davies — dismissed from the military over a bank robbery charge, then the survivor of a massacre in a country called Quabus — has been hired to kill him.

John Fletcher's script, directed by Robert Tronson, is a thriller that keeps its politics close to the surface. Ronald Fraser plays Newton with the silky assurance of a man who knows exactly how much of the truth to tell; the trade deal, Bergerac discovers, includes an arms deal between Nigel Ripley — an acquitted arms dealer now on the Law and Order Committee, and one of Hungerford's dinner guests — and the men who massacred Davies' village. The episode's Milton quotation — "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints" — is planted in Ripley's house as a taunt, and it gives the hour its title and its moral weight.

Bergerac's journey is from obedient detective to unwilling participant. Newton orders him to protect Ahmed, the man responsible for the massacre; Davies, living rough in the island's fields, has been stealing chickens to survive. The two men meet on a cliff top, Davies holding Bergerac at gunpoint, and the conversation between them is the episode's heart: Davies talks of living among ordinary people, of Cromwell choosing to run the country his own way, of Ripley arming both sides of a war for profit. When Davies kills Ripley instead of Ahmed, and Bergerac shoots him, the detective refuses congratulations.

The final scenes are the series' most cynical. Newton admits, off the record, that he and Ripley set up the import-export front, that Ripley blackmailed him, and that the whole operation has been about protecting the deal. Then, in the Bureau, he makes a threat against Bergerac's daughter Kim — talking about how vulnerable children are at that age — and Bergerac stands up, furious. The episode ends with him walking the streets with Davies' words ringing in his ears. A grave, angry finale to the fourth series, and proof that Bergerac could do politics as well as policing.