Crack-Up

A car bomb goes off and the unit's police contact, Roddy, is seriously injured. The team is accused of negligence, and Maggie Forbes takes the accusation personally, because it is aimed at her. From there the episode does something this show rarely tries: it takes its leading lady out of action.

Maggie's behaviour turns erratic, she collapses, and the diagnosis is mental exhaustion. The collapse is handled without melodrama, and the convalescence scenes have a stillness the show rarely risks. During her convalescence her memory starts to come back, and when a truth drug is administered, the recollections reveal that there was double dealing all along, and not by the people the accusation pointed at. But the episode trusts its audience to watch a detective put herself back together, which is a different kind of tension from a chase.

Paul Wheeler wrote it and Edward Bennett directed. Jill Gascoine gets the kind of episode actors ask for, with Simon Chandler as Roddy, Brian Croucher as Fox, Geoffrey Greenhill as Simcox, Jo Cameron Brown as the Nurse, Michael Jayston as Miles Bennett and Penelope Lee as Mrs Selwyn, while Leslie Ash's Fred, Tracy-Louise Ward's Tessa and Don Warrington's Nigel hold the unit together in her absence. It went out in June 1986, late in the second series. Michael Jayston, who plays Miles Bennett, had been Peter Guillam in the original Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, so the guest list carries a face from the serious end of British espionage.

Mental exhaustion as a plot device could be handled clumsily, but the show plays it honestly, and Gascoine sells it. The accusation of negligence gives the episode its engine: the unit is under a cloud, and Maggie's recovery is also a defence of the team. The truth drug scene is the payoff, and it lands. It is a strange, slow-burning episode for a show usually in a hurry, and all the better for it.