Barriers

Tom Darblay is called away to tend to an illness in the family, and PC David Gallagher is wrestling with a family crisis of his own. Barriers is an episode about the walls between the job and the home, and about what happens to them when life stops respecting the boundary.

The two threads run side by side through the week. Jean Darblay watches her husband deal with the sickness of someone close, and Gallagher tries to hold his professional life together while his private one comes apart at the seams. The station keeps working around them, but the episode's real interest is in how these pressures leak into the work: the distracted constable, the wife keeping her voice steady, the moments when the uniform is the only thing holding a person up. George Darblay, played by James Garbutt, adds a family face to the picture, and Gerald Towne, Dr. Maidment, Nicki Taylor, Mr. Bentham and a waiter with a tray full of other people's business round out the world.

Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, Jonathan Alwyn directed. Stephanie Turner is Jean Darblay, David Hargreaves is Tom, David Ellison is Sergeant Joseph Beck and Gerard Kelly is PC David Gallagher. James Garbutt plays George Darblay, Jack Watson is Gerald Towne, George Waring is Dr. Maidment, Joanna Palmer is Nicki Taylor, Bill Dean is Mr. Bentham and Albert Moses is the Waiter.

The episode gives the series its emotional texture without ever losing the police setting. People who spend their days investigating other people's secrets have secrets of their own, and the show is honest about how thin the partitions are.

It is a slow, warm, sad hour. The barriers of the title are the ones officers build to keep their work from following them home, and the episode is about how rarely they hold.