Free Trade

A drug-related shooting leaves the usual wreckage, and Clark's team is hired to pick up the pieces. But the real action is elsewhere. Connell has been made an offer she can't refuse, and the secrecy and paranoia that come with it are starting to cost her the one solid thing she has, her relationship with Kate Roberts. Meanwhile Clark and Naylor are setting up an arms job that promises proper money, and Connell wants in. The pair are convinced it's too dangerous, and they tell her so, which goes down about as well as you'd expect.

J. C. Wilsher and Gordon Hann wrote it, Ross Devenish directed, and the episode is a study in the price of ambition. Siobhan Redmond gives Connell the hunger and the hurt in equal measure, and Barbara Wilshere's Kate makes the domestic thread feel as serious as the deals. Roger Allam, who'd spend years as Endeavour's Fred Thursday, is Peter Adams, and Frederick Treves's Tom Roland and Christopher Hunter's DCI Lawson keep the professional world properly crowded. Sylvestra Le Touzel's Sarah Teale and Eve Bland's Ellie Hughes are on the edges of the cast, part of the freelance world that keeps circling the old firm, and DCI Lawson is a returning face, the sort of continuity the season keeps quietly.

The push-pull between career opportunity and risk is the heart of it. Connell watches the men edge toward the big score and hates being left behind, and the episode never lets you forget that she's usually the one with the nerve. The arms deal, the shooting, the secrecy, it all bleeds into domestic life, which is the show's oldest trick and still its best one. The drug shooting that opens the hour is almost an afterthought, and that's deliberate; the damage the show cares about is the domestic kind. Connell's choice between the offer she can't refuse and the woman she doesn't want to lose is the episode's real plot, and the arms job is just the noise around it.