Judgement

Makepeace's best friend Sarah is raped and murdered on a train to London, and the investigation is stopped dead before it starts: Sarah's father, Judge Hackett, forbids an autopsy. But it is a brutal opening, and the episode never finds an easy way around the ruling. Jesse Carr-Martindale wrote it, William Brayne directed, and the restraint they show here is the whole game.

With the body off-limits, the case runs on what little the witnesses saw. Makepeace spots a man on the train, a mentally deficient man named John Bates, and the hour becomes a careful study in how much weight a single sighting can carry. Colin Prockter gives Bates a vulnerability that keeps the story honest, and Ruby Head's Mrs. Bates does what she can from the edges. John Horsley's Judge Hackett carries the grief of a man who has used his authority to protect his daughter and made everything harder.

Around them the machinery of the procedural hums: David Barrass's Det. Insp. Wilson, Tony Osoba's Det. Sgt. Chas Jarvis, Graham Rowe's Atkins, Sarah Sherborne as the victim. It is an episode that asks its detectives to work without the usual tools, and the resolution comes from character rather than forensics. Tip Tipping, Iain Rattray and Brett Forrest round out the guest list. The episode went out on 15 March 1985, partway through the first series. It is one of the show's quietest hours, a study in what a case looks like when the evidence is thin and the grief is thick. It is the kind of episode that travels well, because it depends on character rather than spectacle.

The title is doing real work. Everyone in the hour is passing judgement on someone, and most of them are wrong at least once. It is not the flashiest episode of the season, but it is one of the ones that stays with you, mostly because of the restraint at its centre.