Endangered Species

Level Earth, a conservationist group, opposes a new motorway link road. The campaigners target the chief engineer of the project and disable a bulldozer on the site, and Crabbe is told to catch them. The assignment is the last of the first series, and it is built to put him in an impossible position.

The investigation turns up an awkward fact: the protesters include some very respectable people. Margaret is among them, and so is Henderson, the restaurant's food supplier, who is sheltering the group's leading activist. The ringleader is known as Reynard the Fox, and Henderson is hiding him. Crabbe is therefore looking for a fugitive who is being concealed by his own wife's associates and his own supplier.

He then finds evidence that a thuggish security boss employed by the construction company has been sending heavies to intimidate the protesters. The discovery changes the shape of the case. The criminal conduct Crabbe was sent to investigate is not confined to the campaigners, and the security firm hired to protect the roadworks has been using violence against people whose objection is legitimate.

The episode resolves against the construction company and its security operation rather than against the protesters. Crabbe uses the evidence of intimidation to defeat the company and to defeat Fisher, and the published billing describes the outcome as his blow for free speech. What he charges anyone with, and how the matter ends for the security boss, is not set out in the sources, and this article does not invent it. Margaret and Henderson are not prosecuted, and the leading activist's position is vindicated by the other side's conduct.

Margaret's participation is the most direct conflict between the Crabbes in the first series. She is not complicit in anything criminal and she is not argued out of her position; the episode resolves in her favour, and Steed plays the conviction as private rather than as a challenge to her husband. Henderson's concealment of Reynard extends him from supplier to something more, the point at which the character's slightly shady past is used rather than mentioned.

The episode is the most openly political of the first series and the one that most clearly states the programme's recurring subject. Its title carries the argument twice over: the conservationists' claim about the countryside, and the series' own joke that respectable protesters, an honest policeman and a man who would rather cook than detect are all, in the world it describes, endangered. It closes a first series whose central arrangement is a blackmail that cannot be undone by letting its detective win outright for once.