Coddled Eggs

Car crime is rising in Middleton and most of the vehicles are being taken from the car park at the railway station. Crabbe is drafted onto Operation Grabbitback, the recovery operation, under a new and hostile senior officer, Detective Superintendent Chalmers. Chalmers is the episode's obstacle: a forceful, abrasive investigator who dictates how the operation is run, treats Crabbe as an assistant and is not interested in anything beyond the recoveries. The work is physical and undignified, with Crabbe out repossessing stolen cars from the people who unknowingly bought them, and the comedy is a senior detective being made to do the least skilled work in the force.

The operation recovers cars and Chalmers catches the small fry, one set of thieves, and declares the case closed. Crabbe and Fisher keep digging, because there are two separate sets of thieves at work. Things come to a head when Fisher's own car is stolen from the station car park, right under his nose, which removes any possibility of the operation being wound up quietly.

The larger operation is not car theft for its own sake. Chalmers's small-fry arrest covers a smuggling ring using the stolen vehicles, and the ring is headed by two men credited as Boris and Cyril. Crabbe and Fisher go past Chalmers's closed case and apprehend the ring. It is the one episode in the run where Crabbe's success is shared with Fisher, the two of them working the case together against a colleague's judgement, and Chalmers is seen off by the result. The DVD Talk review records the detail that in the course of the operation she is willing to drop false charges against Crabbe in order to come out on top of the investigation.

On the restaurant side, a food inspector, Ms Forelle, is making repeated visits to Pie in the Sky and threatening to close the restaurant unless hygiene standards improve. Gary and Margaret are the ones dealing with her. Both strands close in the same movement: the police case and the restaurant problem both end when the obstructive official is overruled.

Phyllis Logan's Chalmers is the guest performance the episode is built around, and Malcolm Sinclair's Fisher is unusually allied with Crabbe, because having his own car stolen makes him an investigator rather than a manager. Serena Evans's Ms Forelle pairs with Chalmers as the two officials dictating to Crabbe, and the pairing is deliberate: the episode is about being told how to do your job by someone who does not understand it. Griffiths' Crabbe is out of the kitchen for most of the running time, and the joke is the gap between his abilities and the task.

The title continues the series' food joke, coddled eggs being an over-protected dish, and the episode's paired obstructions are both people who coddle their own positions. Its theme is authority and jurisdiction: Chalmers has the rank and closes the case early, Fisher has the politics and loses his own car, and Crabbe has the instincts and no authority at all. The ending rewards the person with none of the three in isolation but all of them in combination. The smuggling ring arrives late and is thinly characterised, which is the episode's honest weakness, but it closes Series 3 and is one of the two best-rated episodes of the run.