Whispering Grass

Whispering Grass gives Alex her own story. Her former boyfriend, David Kennedy, has just been released from prison and is living in a hostel for rehabilitation. She finds herself in danger of letting her heart rule her head, because she worries that he may be getting involved in crime again.

TheTVDB describes Alex as Boon's Girl Friday, in love with a man who has just come out of prison, and asks whether he will slip back into crime. It is a question that the series had asked about other characters, from Cecil Bowman in the third series to the returning convicts of the sixth, but this time the person who asks it works in the CBS office.

Ken and Rocky go undercover to find out more about Kennedy's involvement in whatever is going on, and the investigation soon takes them into an explosive situation. The word may be literal or figurative; the outline does not say.

The episode has a notable cast. Sean Pertwee plays Kennedy. IMDb also credits Colin Farrell as Jack Morris and Vincent Regan as Robert Cady, alongside Bill Moody, Robert Glenister and Allan Surtees. Helen Slavin wrote the script, her third of the last series after Queen's Gambit and Is There Anybody There?, and Anya Camilleri directs.

Alex has been the programme's newest regular, played by Saskia Wickham from the start of the series, and the last to join, and she has been used differently from the women who preceded her. She is the one who solved the riddle of the name Verdi in Queen's Gambit, who organised the walkout in defence of Rocky, and who opened MacGuffin's safe with a laptop in the first episode. An episode in which her private life is the subject, and Ken and Rocky are sent to protect it, is a fair acknowledgement of that.

The strength is the dilemma. Alex has been the sensible one, and she is at risk of being the one who is fooled. The weakness, if there is one, is that Ken and Rocky are asked to work out her boyfriend's secrets behind her back, a role that Ken has played before with clients he liked, and that usually ends with a complaint.

IMDb users rate the episode 6.8. With the end of the series close, it is a modest story about a woman who has to decide whether to trust a man who has just come out of prison.