Enemy Fire

The burns unit at Digby Manor is the setting of Enemy Fire: the RAF has requisitioned a private house and turned it into a hospital for pilots pulled from burning aircraft, and it is run by the surgeon Patrick Jamieson against the open doubt of the service officer overseeing the place, Group Captain Lawrence Smythe. The methods Smythe distrusts are the ones that work. Sir Michael Waterford, who owns the manor, and his housekeeper, Mrs Roecastle, have been turned out of the house and comply without liking it. The episode keeps the hospital at the centre and the crime at the edge, so a series of small acts of sabotage at the manor, traced in the end to the housekeeper's grievance over the requisition, is almost a diversion from what matters.

What matters is the air war's cost, and the episode carries it on two fronts. On the squadron, Andrew Foyle is relieved when his friend Greville Woods is sent out on a night reconnaissance in his place, and the relief curdles when Woods crashes and is brought back with severe burns. Andrew, by then worn down, goes absent without leave and hides at Stewart's flat, and the episode plays the exhaustion as a breakdown rather than a breach of discipline, recognised as such by his wing commander. Beside that, the new ARP warden, Peter Preston, tells the surgeon Brian Wrenn that Wrenn's wife is having an affair. At the centre of the story is Gordon Drake, a man connected one way or another to most of the other characters, who is murdered.

Foyle and Milner work the connections until two facts separate. Wrenn had assaulted Drake at an earlier point, and Wrenn is not the killer. The man who killed Drake is Peter Preston, Wrenn's brother-in-law, and his motive is Drake's abusive treatment of his sister, Beryl Drake. The resolution therefore turns on the audience having believed, for most of the running time, that the obvious suspect did it. The burns material is said to be broadly based on the work of Archibald McIndoe and the RAF patients known as his guinea pigs, though the record marks that link as a reported claim rather than one established by the sources. On his return to the squadron, Andrew Foyle is promoted to flight lieutenant and moved by Wing Commander Turner to a training posting, by an officer who understands what the young man has already been through and what the promotion is for.

The episode's strength is the treatment of that exhaustion, handled without either sentimentality or contempt, and it is one of the clearest studies in the run of how the series watched wartime trauma. Bill Paterson gives Jamieson a practical stubbornness that makes Smythe's objections look like the obstacle rather than the method. The weakness is the murder itself, which is comparatively conventional; once the timeline is fixed, the killer is the obvious suspect, and the reveal does not carry the weight the burns unit does.

Julian Ovenden's Andrew and Anthony Howell's Milner, whose leg Wrenn amputated, give the episode its domestic and medical histories, and it is one of the few instalments to show Foyle as a father rather than only as an officer. It sits in the middle of series 3 as the episode that moves Foyle's family from the background to the centre of a story's cost.