Warriors

"Warriors" is the final series' strangest hour — a story about a missing wife, a cult that believes in Atlantis and the things people will do to escape the world. Bergerac, hired by a friend of Charlie's, retired Major Norman Atherton, travels to England to find Laura, the major's wife, who has run off with George Bolingham — a man Atherton was at school and in the army with, and who was interested in Laura before she married him. Bolingham leads the Atlantean Fellowship, a group who talk to invisible people. Atherton wants a reconnaissance: is Laura being brainwashed, or is she there of her own free will?

Tony MacNabb's script, directed by Terry Green, is a story about belief and its uses. Bolingham — played with a ragged, unsettling sincerity — genuinely believes in the Enlightened Ones, the Atlanteans who destroyed themselves by nuclear war and will do it again, in his telling, because of men like Bergerac: good men who believe they are right. The Fellowship is a community of the lost — the scarred man who was found at Glastonbury, the woman who remembers being burnt as a witch in a past life, the elderly couple who have nowhere else to go. The series does not mock them; it lets them be real, which is far more unsettling.

The question at the centre is whether Laura is a victim or a deserter. Atherton, drunk and desperate, wants proof of an affair so he can stop hoping; Laura, it emerges, has sold shares, has chosen this life, and is not being held against her will. The episode refuses the easy answer of brainwashing — and the harder truth, that a wife might simply leave a husband she no longer loves for a belief he cannot share, is the real story.

The climax is a study in how far obsession goes. Atherton, sacked by his own detective, loads a gun and follows Laura himself; Bergerac, who has seen the Fellowship and understood it, races to stop him. The resolution is quiet and painful: no one is saved, no one is converted, and the marriage is over either way. A grave, thoughtful hour that shows the final series could do belief and its costs without cheap cynicism — and a reminder that Bergerac's last cases were increasingly about the choices people make, not the crimes they commit.