The Cortez Connection

Dempsey is tracking Cortez, a South American drug runner moving cocaine, when his ex-girlfriend Simone turns up out of nowhere. She found him the way ex-girlfriends always do: by calling his mother. And there is no dodging a woman with your mother's number, so the arrival throws the pursuit into chaos at exactly the wrong moment. The two plots run on parallel tracks for most of the hour, and the interest is in watching them threaten to merge.

Guy Meredith wrote it, Baz Taylor directed. Susannah Fellows's Simone is the engine of the personal half of the story, and Francisco Morales's Cortez the engine of the professional one. Kim Wall's D.C. Fry, Jonathan Docker-Drysdale's D.S. Ward, David Taylor's detective and Patrick Gordon's Colombian fill out the operational side, with Ray Smith's Spikings and Tony Osoba's Chas Jarvis holding the office. It first went out on 18 October 1986, and the episode gets its tension from the collision between the chase and the reunion, with Dempsey trying to keep a professional eye on Cortez while Simone keeps both eyes on him.

The episode is a collision of two genres, drug-running thriller and old-fashioned personal melodrama, and it wears the joins without shame. Dempsey, never comfortable being examined by anyone, least of all himself, gets a full hour of it, and Michael Brandon plays the discomfort well. Makepeace watches the reunion with the expression of a woman filing it away for later. Baz Taylor, who directed The Prizefighter earlier in the season, is back behind the camera, and he keeps the drug-running thriller and the personal melodrama running at the same clip without letting either crowd the other.

It is a sprawling, slightly untidy episode, and the untidiness is part of the charm. Neither half works without the other, and the episode knows it. Cortez is the case and Simone is the complication. Dempsey is the one caught between them, and he handles it about as well as you would expect.