The Q Word

For once the title has nothing to do with anything supernatural. The Q word is the quiet one: everyone knows what it means, nobody says it, and this week it's hanging over Tommy Foster in the form of a firearms exam that's been brought forward. Quick, and no time to wobble. For Tommy, who has spent his first season proving himself, the timing couldn't be worse.

The hour spreads its attention across several kinds of risk. Mo's side deal goes ahead, and every scene with his father gets tighter as the money moves. Tommy faces the exam with the whole station watching, and Stevie Neil, played by Martin McCann, sets himself the job of talking Grace Ellis into coming back to work. None of these are crimes in the usual sense, but they're all loaded, and the show knows the difference between a bomb and a slow leak. It treats each problem with the same weight it gives a case with a crime scene, which is the whole point of the week.

Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson wrote it, Gilles Bannier directed, and it aired in April 2023, one before the season finale. Siân Brooke's Grace gets the quieter half of the episode, arguing with her own doubts, while Nathan Braniff's Tommy gets the sweat. Katherine Devlin's Annie and Richard Dormer's Gerry Cliff hold the edges and keep the station feeling lived-in. Nobody here is saving the city; they're all just trying to get through the week in one piece, which is its own kind of heroism.

It's a week of tests, and the episode treats each one seriously without pretending they're all equal. Tommy's is a matter of competence, Mo's of loyalty. And Stevie's is a matter of faith in a colleague, the kind of faith that's hardest to rebuild.