Breaking Point

A picket line gets out of hand, people get hurt, and DSU Tony Clark is sent in to find out who is responsible. The injuries are real, the claims of police brutality are loud, and the hard evidence is thin on the ground. Old loyalties muddy every interview. It's a classic industrial-dispute enquiry, and the episode knows there's no version of it that ends with everyone satisfied.

Written by Rob Heyland and directed by Charles McDougall, it sets the investigation against Clark's private life, which is by now heading downhill at a rate of knots. The Sue and Jenny entanglement is pulling him apart, and the script doesn't pretend a man in that state does his best work. The riot inquiry and the domestic mess keep borrowing trouble from each other.

The guest casting again rewards the patient viewer. Jack Shepherd, later Wycliffe, is Commander Neame. Colin Buchanan, who would become DS Beech in The Bill, plays Dan Page. And Jane Wymark, future Mrs Barnaby of Midsomer Murders, is the News Editor. The regulars hold the frame steady around them, Tony Doyle's Deakin and David Lyon's Huxtable applying pressure from above while Siobhan Redmond's Connell and Tom Georgeson's Naylor do the grunt work.

What the episode does well is resist easy answers. Nobody on the picket line is purely wrong, and nobody in uniform is purely right, and the enquiry creaks along under the weight of that. It's one of the show's strongest statements about the Met and industrial conflict, made without raising its voice. The picket line violence is staged with restraint, which makes it worse; you watch the batons and the bottles and think about how close to the surface this always sits. And the episode's patience with the enquiry's dead ends is part of the point, because real investigations spend most of their time going nowhere.