Another Part of the Jungle

The job is a church clock. Bulman takes it on in the spirit of a man who enjoys honest work, and for a while the episode is exactly that: a craftsman's day out, gears and pendulums, the satisfaction of a job done properly. But the clock is soon forgotten, because a hitman is in the parish, and the rest of the hour is about the collision between a man fixing time and a man ending it.

Henry Livings wrote the script, which may explain why the dialogue has more air in it than the average episode: the threat is allowed to arrive slowly. Christopher King directed, keeping the menace at the edges of the frame long enough to make it count. The church setting gives the hour a stillness that the violence eventually breaks, and the contrast does most of the dramatic work. The menace is real precisely because the patience around it is real.

Don Henderson is quietly superb at the moment the clock gives way to the case. Bulman has no interest in heroics, but he has a professional reflex that will not let a professional threat pass him by, and Henderson plays that reflex as something closer to annoyance than courage. There is a lovely shrug in the performance, the resignation of a man who keeps telling himself the job was just a clock. It is a performance built on held breath, and it works. Siobhan Redmond's Lucy McGinty keeps pace, as steady a presence as the show has.

The title is the episode's thesis. The jungle is not a place, it is a line of work, and a retired detective who repairs clocks has simply found a quieter part of it. The hitman's arrival proves the point. There is no peaceful corner of the jungle, only quieter ones, and that is the episode's quiet achievement: it makes the jungle feel like somewhere you could walk into by mistake.