New Leaf

Fisher assigns Crabbe to guard Sasha Wilkes at a police safe house. Sasha is the wife of a gangster and is due to testify against him in court. DCI Harding had expected the job and is resentful at being passed over.

Sasha is initially hostile, and Crabbe wins her over with his cooking, which is the episode's clearest statement of the series' premise, that the way to get through to people is to feed them. She comes to confide in him, and the case strand is as much about the safe house as a domestic arrangement as about the threat to the witness. Harding does not leave it at resentment. He uses a drug pusher called Vicky, who once knew Henderson, to discredit Crabbe, and he discloses the location of the safe house to Wilkes, so that what had been a watching brief becomes a defence.

Henry averts disaster: the safe house is compromised and the attempt on Sasha fails, and he and Sasha part as friends. But the episode does not close on that. The epilogue is that Crabbe wonders whether he and Sasha were used as bait by Fisher, because Fisher already suspected Harding. The corruption is not a surprise to Crabbe's superior; it may have been the point of the assignment. That suspicion is left unresolved, which is where the episode ends. The sources state only that Henry wonders whether they were used as bait, and this article does not settle the question either.

The restaurant strand connects directly into the case strand. Henderson is intimidated by a shady figure from his past, the same Vicky who is used by Harding, so the instrument of the attempt to discredit Crabbe is also the restaurant's problem. The nature of Vicky's past connection to Henderson is not stated in the sources, and it is not invented here. It is one of the closer joins of the two halves in the run, and it is the restaurant-strand material that matters most for the recurring cast, because Henderson is usually the series' comic supplier and here he has a past that can reach him.

Lynsey Baxter's Sasha is one of the more substantial one-episode guest roles of the run, because she has to move from hostility to trust without becoming a victim, and the dialogue between her and Crabbe is where the characterisation happens: he is not persuading her of anything, he is cooking. Martin Turner's DCI Harding is the clearer piece of character work, since his motive is a passed-over assignment and soured professional pride rather than money, and he is treated as a police officer whose grievance produces corruption rather than as a criminal in a uniform.

The episode is built on the standard police-thriller situation of a witness in a safe house under threat from the man she will testify against, and the series' contribution is to make the threat come from inside the police rather than only from the defendant. The food-and-crime pairing is at its most integrated: cooking is not a hobby here, it is the mechanism by which the witness is won. Mr E Reviews rated this the strongest episode of the set and singled out exactly that, judging it a pleasure to see how well the food is integrated into the story. The safe-house genre is well worn and the resentful-colleague villain has few surprises in him, and what lifts the episode above routine is the cooking and the closing suspicion rather than the plot's architecture.