Fit

The unit is on an army training stint when Sir Jack Fenn tells Maggie Forbes that they are holding a top Czech spy, Kessler, for debriefing. It should be a simple matter of keeping one prisoner comfortable until he talks. Maggie starts checking the other recruits on the exercise and finds that a number of them don't check out at all, and Fenn begins to suspect the KGB want Kessler dead or alive, and are prepared to come and get him either way.

A kidnap attempt follows, then a murder attempt, and the team foils both. And all the while Fenn, the man in charge, is keeping something back. The exercise is the perfect cover for the real operation, and the show enjoys the confusion. The episode does the slow reveal well: you can feel the moment Maggie stops trusting the man who gave her the briefing.

Reg Ford wrote it and Terry Marcel directed. Charles Gray, best known to many as a Bond villain, plays Sir Jack Fenn with exactly the right amount of smooth menace, with Constantine Gregory as Kessler, Jon Iles as Harley, Michael Howe as Jimmy Barron, James Cosmo as Howard, Doug Robinson as Greaves and Robert Vowles as Parker, and Jill Gascoine's Maggie, Leslie Ash's Fred and Tracy-Louise Ward's Tessa in the thick of it. It went out in May 1986. James Cosmo, who plays Howard, would go on to Braveheart and Game of Thrones, so the recruit list has a future star hiding in plain sight, which suits an episode about people who are not what they seem.

Army training exercises are a gift to a show like this: uniforms everywhere, everyone saluting, and no way to tell who actually belongs. The episode uses the setting properly. Kessler, as played by Constantine Gregory, is a decent man in a rotten situation, and the episode lets him be a person rather than a plot point. When the man in charge is the one you can't read, nobody is safe.