Past Lives

A face from Inspector Jean Darblay's history turns up in Hartley, and the meeting colours everything else that happens that week. Past Lives runs the personal thread through a stretch of ordinary police work that includes a robbery at the local co-op and the baffling disappearance of several pigs from a farm. It went out in October 1982, deep into the show's third series, when the Hartley format was settled enough to let a week this quiet breathe, and it makes the most of that trust.

The pigs are the best kind of absurdity, the sort of case that makes the station groan and the viewer smile, and the co-op robbery is business as usual. But the week's real weight is the old acquaintance, and the episode watches Darblay try to keep her professional focus while the past keeps pulling at her sleeve. Sergeant Joseph Beck and Sergeant George Parrish carry the routine work with PC Martin Helmshore, and the community supplies its usual cast: Leonard Thurgood, Peter Marshall, Valerie Middleton, John Martin, and Harry and Sadie Joyce. Underneath all of it runs the question of what the face from the past wants, and what it costs Darblay to find out.

Tony Parker wrote it, Oliver Horsbrugh directed. Stephanie Turner is Jean Darblay, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish and David Straun as PC Martin Helmshore. Tenniel Evans plays Leonard Thurgood, Jeremy Nicholas is Peter Marshall, Sue Wallace is Valerie Middleton, Stephen Kemble is John Martin, Glyn Jones is Harry Joyce and Kim Clifford is Sadie Joyce.

The episode's argument is that the personal always bleeds into the professional, however firmly the door is closed. The theft and the missing livestock demand attention, but the honest reckoning with who Darblay used to be is the harder case, and the show lets it take its time.

Sometimes the most difficult cases are not the ones with broken locks. They are the ones that require facing the person you used to be.