Guardian Angel

Makepeace has a vision of Dempsey being shot dead, and it is enough to make her resign from the police force. While she works on a dinosaur exhibition at the Natural History Museum, Dempsey is paired with Joyce Hargreaves, a detective who has been desk-bound for years. When Dempsey is then nearly killed during an investigation, the vision starts to look less like nerves and more like a warning. The vision arrives out of nowhere and refuses to be explained away, which is what makes it so hard for Makepeace to ignore.

Ranald Graham wrote it, Michael Brandon directed, the star taking a turn behind the camera. Kate O'Mara's Joyce Hargreaves is a treat, a woman being pulled out of storage and asked to remember how the job works, and Richard Johnson's Daish, John Ainley's Crazy Joe, Derek Newark's Corman, Damien Thomas's Tony and Don Henderson's Dan fill out the case around them. It first went out on 1 November 1986, and it gave Michael Brandon the chance to direct his co-star in the episode where the partnership comes apart.

And the episode is about what the job costs, something the show usually left implied. Makepeace's exit is not a tantrum; it is the reasonable decision of a woman who has just watched the man she works with die in her head, and the episode treats her choice with respect. When Dempsey is nearly killed for real, the decision stops being about one bad dream. Makepeace's time at the Natural History Museum gives the episode a strange calm before the storm, and the dinosaur exhibition is the sort of odd detail the show liked to hang a story on.

It is a quiet, serious season closer, and it ends with the partnership in pieces, which is braver than most shows would have been. Whether the pieces get put back together is a question the show left for its audience.