Sea Changes

The seventh series opens with the sea giving up its secrets — and with a change of pace in Bergerac's private life. "Sea Changes" begins with two seamen trying to retrieve a drum lodged in the rocks; it springs a leak, one man is overcome by the fumes, and the other sails off without it. By morning the man is dead of asphyxiation, and the drum is one of five washed off a freighter in a storm — drums containing a pesticide banned in the EEC, fifty of which were stolen from a manufacturer in Spain. The trail leads to the Rosiana, a ship at the docks with a Portuguese crew, and to the import-export company Rabat Trading.

Edwin Pearce's script, directed by Richard Standeven, is a proper environmental-crime procedural with a human cost. Ciarán Hinds, in an early television role, plays Renwick, the Rosiana's captain, with a cold, evasive menace that marks him as the episode's villain long before the evidence catches up with him. The pesticide is the cargo; the dead seaman, the man who tried to retrieve it; and the cover-up, the series shows, is as dangerous as the poison. WPC Maria Duvane, seconded to the Bureau, gives Bergerac a partner who actually knows the shipping trade, and the episode uses her well.

The investigation spreads outward in the series' familiar way: the drunk former captain Bonaparte, who knows too much and is beaten for it; the missing girl Elaine, whose mother Margaret refuses to accept the official line and is found dead, apparently jumped from a window; the customs raid that finds the pesticide in a warehouse. The threads connect through Rabat Trading and its manager Hafiz, and through the simple truth that the island's money has always run on what the sea brings in.

What makes the hour linger is the human detail. Margaret Rice, the mother who kept collecting her daughter's dole money and refusing to believe she was gone, is the episode's quiet tragedy; the seaman who sailed away from his dying colleague is its casual cruelty. Bergerac, meanwhile, is learning that Susan is selling her share of the estate agency and taking over the Channel Islands branch of Rospers — a sea change of her own that the season will work through.

It is a sombre, serious opener that shows the seventh series' willingness to open on pollution, greed and a mother's grief rather than a tidy murder. Hinds' captain is a strong villain, and the resolution — the pesticide traced, the cover-up exposed — is earned through patient police work. A grounded start to a year that would put Bergerac's own future in question.