Plan of Attack

April 1944, and the Sussex coast is filling with troops for the invasion, but the Hastings police station has been hollowed out. Christopher Foyle resigned more than a year ago and has spent his retirement dictating a history of the wartime constabulary, typed badly by Samantha Stewart, who has meanwhile taken work as a librarian at an Air Ministry cartography site at Beverley Lodge, where aerial photographs of Germany are turned into maps for bombing missions. His replacement, DCS John Meredith, has unsettled the station and driven officers out; Paul Milner has stayed, unhappily, and asks Foyle's advice about leaving. A trucking racketeer, Bill Burton, is arrested for paying servicemen to authorise deliveries that never happened, and warns him that he has powerful friends.

At the lodge the airman cartographer Henry Scott is troubled by irregularities in the map data and by the knowledge that his work is helping to kill German civilians. His confidant is Father Martin Keppler, a German refugee Catholic priest in Hastings for an ecumenical conference that argues for the forgiveness of the enemy and a conditional German surrender. Scott is found hanged in woods near the conference and the death is read as suicide; Milner is unconvinced. Then Milner and Meredith are shot at while leaving the station one evening. Meredith is killed and Milner is plainly the intended target, and at the urging of Assistant Commissioner Henry Parkins, Foyle agrees to return.

Foyle's return joins the two crimes. He exposes Wing Commander Stephen Foster as a bribe-taker inside Burton's network, one instance being the hiring of Foster's unqualified nephew. He then identifies Keppler as a German spy and as the man answerable for the deaths of Scott and Meredith and the attempt on Milner. The sources set out the mechanism, a spy working under clerical cover who silences a mapmaker and shoots the officers who arrested Burton's contact, but they do not state his motive in explicit terms, and none has been invented here. The case ends with the team restored: Foyle and Milner decide to stay, and Stewart leaves the Air Ministry and returns as Foyle's driver, so the original three are back together for the rest of the war.

Its strength is the recall of Foyle as a reluctant obligation rather than a homecoming. Kitchen plays the retirement and the return flatly, and the station's relief at his arrival, rather than anything he says, is what measures his authority. The episode is also honest about what his method had been holding up, using the decline of the station under Meredith as a study in a force hollowed out by a change of chief.

The weakness is pace. A review of the series 5 DVD set judged the episode slow to start, noting that without Foyle at its centre the first forty-five minutes proceed at a leisurely pace, and that it depends on knowing why he resigned, which makes it a poor entry point for a new viewer. Its place in the run is structural: it is the first record made after ITV's 2007 cancellation, which forced Horowitz to discard scripts set across 1943 and 1944 and produced the long time jump the later wartime records run on.