Lemon Twist

A food critic reviews Pie in the Sky well and the restaurant is mobbed. There are customers queuing at the door, and the booking book Margaret uses to judge the venture's success is suddenly full. Crabbe, who has been waiting since the first episode for the restaurant to support him, finds himself with the opposite problem: the business now needs him in the kitchen at the moment the police need him elsewhere.

The police need him at a management development seminar. Crabbe attends with Fisher and DS Cambridge, and the seminar is the episode's comic engine: senior officers being instructed in the management of staff, in the middle of a series about a man who manages his own staff very well and his own career not at all. At the seminar Fisher admits that he has lost confidence in the job and is considering leaving the force.

Crabbe sees the opportunity. If Fisher leaves, the arrangement that keeps Crabbe on the strength, the blackmail that has held him since the first episode, might fall with him. Crabbe swaps their assessment papers at the seminar, hoping the exchange will improve his own position and help him towards the retirement he wants.

The trick backfires. The swapped assessments do not produce the result Crabbe was working for, and the attempt comes to nothing in terms of his pension; the sources state that the trick fails but not the mechanism by which it fails, and nothing is invented here. The restaurant, meanwhile, does not stay full: the rave review is followed by a second visit from a critic, which goes badly, and the crowds go back to normal. The episode ends with the restaurant at its usual trade and Crabbe still a policeman, and he is relieved. The ending's joke is that success would have been the disaster: a restaurant full enough to need him in the kitchen every night would have ended the arrangement and, with it, the life the series is about.

Malcolm Sinclair's Fisher is given the season's most interesting development. His confession of doubt at the seminar is the first time the character has admitted weakness to Crabbe, and the fact that Crabbe's response is to try to exploit it is the episode's sharpest character point: the man who has been blackmailed for two series is willing to use his blackmailer's private despair to get out. That he fails is the episode's own judgement on him and the reason the series can carry on. Griffiths plays the closing relief rather than the closing disappointment.

The title is a food pun on the twist of lemon and on the twist of the plot, and it is the season's last and neatest. The episode is the season's structural summary as well as its ending: both strands are pushed to their furthest point, a restaurant that cannot cope with its success and a police career that has come within one clerical error of ending, and then released. Nothing changes. Its argument is that the balance Crabbe lives in, between the force and the kitchen, is not a problem awaiting a solution but the condition of the series. The management seminar lets the episode write about policing as an institution in a flat, satirical way the season has not used before, and the effect is to place Fisher's private crisis inside an organisation that cannot see it.