Root and Branch

"Root and Branch" is the fifth series' most personal hour — a revenge story that moves from Deborah's doorstep to a hostage siege in Brittany, and leaves Bergerac offering his resignation at the end. It begins quietly: Deborah finds a religious pamphlet on her car, quoting Isaiah — "Woe to him that thinks good evil and evil good" — and begins receiving phone calls where the caller hangs up. Bergerac, who has been divorced from Deborah for years, is slow to see the pattern. The caller thinks they are still married. That, it turns out, is the point.

Christopher Fairbank — later the rough-edged face of countless British dramas — plays Sydney Sterrat with a cold, scriptural intensity that makes him genuinely frightening. Sterrat is a former trainee priest, rejected by the Church, who six years earlier torched his failing business for the insurance and was sent to prison by Bergerac. Released two weeks ago, he has come for revenge — not just on Bergerac, but on the judge, the jury and the suppliers who ruined him. His campaign is precise and cruel: a note left in Deborah's car, a fake call about Kim injured at a farm, a riding hat placed to lure her, a horse dosed with LSD. When he takes Hungerford, Deborah and Kim prisoner at Charlie's house in Brittany, the episode becomes a siege.

Brian Finch's script, directed by Baz Taylor, keeps the theological frame throughout — the pamphlets, the scripture, the rants about eye for eye and root and branch. Sterrat's mother, visited by Bergerac, reveals the wound at the centre of his madness: his pregnant wife Rachel died of an overdose three months after he was jailed, unable to cope with being talked about. He is a man who has lost everything, and he wants Bergerac to know it.

The climax at the Brittany house is the series at its most tense. Bergerac, told to come alone and unarmed, sneaks in, coaxes a faked heart attack from Hungerford, and is knocked flat for his trouble. It is Sterrat's own rage that undoes him: goaded about his wife, he fires at Deborah, and Bergerac overpowers him. The aftermath is grimly domestic — Deborah yells at Bergerac for endangering them; Crozier rejects his resignation and tells him to stop feeling sorry for himself. A dark, driven hour that shows how far the fifth series was willing to push its lead.