New Order

Season two opens with a constable who failed to arrest a violent racist, and at first it looks like a simple case of cowardice or worse. Then the man turns out to be Special Branch, working undercover, and the question stops being why he didn't make the arrest and becomes who he was really working for. Whether the law's interests still come first for him is anyone's guess, and Clark is the one who has to find out.

J. C. Wilsher wrote it, Alan Dossor directed, and the episode has a lot of plates in the air. Deakin is on trial. Clark's rival Graves is angling for promotion, and gets it. An American revisionist historian turns up to make everyone's life harder, and a young officer who went undercover into a fascist organisation looks alarmingly like he's gone native. For Clark, now Acting Detective Chief Superintendent, it's a season opener that announces a wider battlefield: Special Branch, MI5, the security services, all of it.

The guest list has one name that jumps out now. Daniel Craig, years from the tuxedo and the martini, plays Joe Rance, and it's the kind of early-career appearance that makes you appreciate how far he travelled. The usual machinery is present too, Tom Georgeson's Naylor and Siobhan Redmond's Connell keeping the station end of things honest while Robin McCallum's Graves schemes in the foreground.

It's a dense opener, packed with threads that will take the season to unpick. The Deakin affair doesn't go away; it just moves. And the sense you're left with is of a web getting thicker by the week, with Clark somewhere near the middle of it. The trial scenes give Tony Doyle some of his best material, a man defending a career he knows is rotten, and the episode lets the court do its slow, patient work.