Shoot to Kill

An independent documentary producer coaxes Mo Connell into helping with an investigation into shoot to kill policies, and the word "coaxes" is doing a lot of work. She's in over her head with a client, and she needs help, which means calling in the old firm: Clark, who now works for Deakin's private agency, and Naylor. But the reunion is loaded with unspoken history, and the episode lets it sit there.

J. C. Wilsher and Nicholas Martin wrote it, Richard Standeven directed, and the subject matter is the series at its most pointed. Shoot to kill is one of those policy areas where the official version and the operational reality diverge, and before long the investigation is spiralling into an SAS cover-up. The phrase carries real history: shoot to kill was the accusation levelled at SAS operations in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, and the episode trades on that memory without spelling it out. The characters who populate it, Sylvestra Le Touzel's Sarah Teale, Finbar Lynch's Danny McLaughlin, Elizabeth Berrington's Pamela Hewitt, are the kind of people who exist in the grey space between the paperwork and the truth. The cast list goes a little deeper: Alan Francis's P.C. Clive Barrett and Philip Bowen's Jeremy Taylor are part of the same crowded world.

What makes it work is watching familiar dynamics stretched into unfamiliar territory. Connell is the one asking, which reverses the usual flow, and Clark's position outside the force makes him useful and dangerous in equal measure. Deakin's money is somewhere in the background, as it always is these days.

It's an episode about institutional accountability that refuses to pretend institutions are accountable to anyone but themselves. The old team is back together, which is satisfying, and the cover-up they're pulling at is bigger than any of them, which is the point. The documentary producer angle gives the episode a frame most cop shows wouldn't bother with, and it works. The investigation is itself being filmed and shaped, which means the cover-up has to survive two kinds of scrutiny, the official and the public.