In Love and War

"In Love and War" brings Joanna Lumley back to the series for a story about conscience, exile and the cost of taking sides — and it gives her one of her most serious roles. Karen Markham, a Jersey woman surrounded by tribal artifacts and music from Africa, is a supporter of the anti-apartheid cause. When Roland, a fugitive from South Africa, asks her to shelter him while he repairs his boat, she agrees reluctantly — and finds herself drawn into a situation she cannot control. Roland, it emerges, has killed a man: Johan Retief, an agent of the regime he fled, and the men who want him are not far behind.

John Collee's script, directed by Jeremy Ancock, is a political hour in the series' best tradition — the personal and the international braided together. The subplot is pure Bergerac: Hungerford, photographing the harbour for a development plan, is followed by Roland, who fears his picture has been taken; a film is stolen from a developing shop; and the island's Law and Order Committee, chaired by Dennis Ackroyd, has to decide whether to cooperate with a National Security request from Pretoria to send an investigator. Karen blocks it, to the committee's surprise: they do not cooperate with Pretoria.

The tension of the episode is the gap between principle and consequence. Karen believes in the cause, and the cause is real; but Roland is a killer, and the island is small, and the men coming for him will not be stopped by sentiment. The series holds both truths at once — the legitimacy of the fight against apartheid and the impossibility of sheltering a fugitive without becoming part of his danger. Lumley plays Karen with a quiet, worn conviction that makes her final choice — to let Roland go, to accept the consequences — feel like the only honest option.

The episode is a grave, serious hour that shows the eighth series' willingness to engage with politics rather than just decorate its plots with them. It is not the comic Vale of earlier seasons, and Lumley is all the better for the change. A thoughtful entry about love and war in the most literal sense — the love of a cause, the war it brings to ordinary lives — and a reminder that the series' best stories were always the ones with a conscience.