Backlash

Maggie Forbes is pressed into taking a fortnight's holiday, and she does what anyone would do: looks up an old school friend. Within hours the two of them are nearly run down by a hit-and-run driver. Then, visiting a stately home, scaffolding tumbles in what looks like another deliberate attempt on Maggie's life. Holidays, in this show, are for surviving.

When the friend, Penny Osmond, is shot, Maggie stops pretending the danger is coincidence. She is guilty, because the trouble followed her, and she is determined to find out who is behind it. But the revelations she uncovers are the disturbing kind, the sort that make you reconsider everyone she has been spending time with. The stately home, with its scaffolding and tourists, is a good setting for near-misses: accidents that look like accidents and aren't.

Terence Feely wrote it and Francis Megahy directed. Isla Blair's Penny Osmond is the friend paying for Maggie's holiday, with Clive Arrindell as Dr Fletcher, Ivor Roberts as Joe, Jonathan Kydd as Chas Grogan, Stephen Greif as Jack Brand and Chrissy Monk as a Nurse, while Jill Gascoine's Maggie, Leslie Ash's Fred, Tracy-Louise Ward's Tessa and Don Warrington's Nigel work the case. It went out in June 1987. Terence Feely, who wrote it, had written The Big Burn earlier in the same series, and both stories share his taste for threats that arrive in ordinary settings.

There is a neat cruelty in the setup: the unit's leader, told to rest, can't take two days without someone trying to kill her. Isla Blair brings real warmth to Penny, which makes the shooting land harder than it would with a lesser performance. The episode plays the holiday sun against the mounting violence, and the contrast does the work. It is a solid finish to the run, and it ends the series on a note of paranoia that suits the show's best instincts.