MacGuffin's Transputer

MacGuffin's Transputer opens the last series by losing one regular and gaining another. Laura has left CBS, because, according to Rocky, Harry took her for granted. Charlie Hardiman is answering the telephone, and Harry is desperate for a permanent replacement but cannot find one.

The client is Robert MacGuffin, a hardware designer at a computer company, Pictel. He believes that his former secretary, Alexandra Wilton, is stealing the design for the firm's latest transputer, and he wants Ken and Harry to watch her. She has just resigned for no reason he can see, and she has a prison record for cheque fraud. Ken and Rocky set up cameras in a disused warehouse opposite her flat. Rocky follows her to an ice rink, where she meets her boyfriend, Jim Parham.

Ken sees a middle-aged man offer Alex a cheque, which she refuses, and he climbs a fire escape to listen. He hears her say she does not want it and the man call her ungrateful. The man is her father. As he leaves, Alex sees Ken halfway up the building, and Ken, thinking on his feet, claims to be suicidal. She invites him in to talk, and his cover is gone.

Alex then applies for the secretarial job at CBS, and Harry sees that offering it to her is the perfect way of keeping an eye on her. Ken needs convincing. MacGuffin tells them that Jim works for a rival firm, the Wyatt Corporation, and then sets his own trap. He lets himself into Alex's flat and hides the circuit board in the toilet cistern. Jim finds it when the toilet will not flush, and takes the chips.

When Ken explains to Alex why he was watching her, she realises that her old boss planted the board, and she is angry at the way he sacked her without explanation. She suggests putting the transputer back in his safe.

Ken, Harry, Rocky and Alex gatecrash a party at Pictel, where Alex, in a black cocktail dress, connects a laptop to the electronic lock on his safe. When Pictel's boss, Liz Kennedy, demands that MacGuffin open it, the transputer is inside. He is sacked, and Alex tells Liz that she already has a job, in security.

Peter Palliser wrote the episode and Nicholas Laughland directs. Peter McEnery plays MacGuffin, Saskia Wickham makes her first appearance as Alex, and Daniel Craig appears as Jim Parham. The series' final title sequence has Ken in a cinema, with clips of the previous six series.

The strength is the frame-up that fails. MacGuffin tries to plant the evidence, and the woman he is framing turns the plot round on him, which is also how she gets her job. The weakness is the means, a toilet cistern and a safe opened by laptop, which suit the comedy better than the logic. But it introduces Alex well, as a woman who sees through the men who have hired her.