Gary's Cake

Pie in the Sky is held up at gunpoint during service, while a jewel-laden guest named Mrs Burdett is present. DS Stringer arrives to investigate, and his manner is abrasive enough to alienate the whole restaurant staff, including the normally equable Crabbe. The friction between the visiting detective and the restaurant is the episode's running engine.

Stringer's theory is an inside job. He accuses Gary first, then Nicola and her new boyfriend Paul, of having passed on the information about the Burdetts' booking to the thieves, that is, of having told the robbers a wealthy guest would be in the restaurant that night. Crabbe's own staff become suspects in his own restaurant.

Crabbe responds by closing the restaurant and conducting his own investigation. The method that produces the answer is conversational rather than forensic: Henry's judicious questioning of the victim brings the solution, and the jewel owner rather than the staff is where the information comes from, which is a neat inversion of the assumption that the leak was in the kitchen. No source names the person responsible, and this article does not supply a name.

Crabbe solves it in time to mark two years of Gary giving up alcohol with a celebratory cake, which is the title and the reason the episode is named after a dish at all. The cake is a restaurant occasion rather than a police one, and the episode ends in the kitchen.

The final scene carries the most consequential moment. ACC Fisher tells Crabbe he is in for a change, and the audience is not told what the change is. This is a deliberate bridge into the next series, where the change turns out to be the Public Duties Squad and the two new officers who accompany Crabbe. Mr E Reviews noted it explicitly as the most intriguing thing about the episode, that the change is left a mystery until the following season.

Nicholas Lamont's Gary is the episode's emotional centre and the part is written to give him more than the series usually does. Gary is accused of betraying the restaurant, which for a character introduced as an ex-offender given a chance in Crabbe's kitchen is the accusation that cuts deepest, and the two-years-sober cake is the payoff: the episode uses the accusation to make a point about what Gary has actually done with the time. The episode is also where the series establishes that Nicola's time at Pie in the Sky is ending, and it is her last credited episode in the role. The series does not make a scene of it, which is consistent with how it handles cast change throughout. Rupert Holliday-Evans' DS Stringer is the comic antagonist, a police officer whose brusqueness is presented as a professional liability.

The episode inverts the series' usual division: the crime happens inside the restaurant rather than outside it, and the detective is protecting his own staff from the police rather than investigating strangers. The two strands of the format are therefore not parallel at all, because the restaurant is the scene. The theme is the assumption of internal guilt, and the episode's argument is that the obvious explanation, that the leak came from the kitchen, is wrong. Its significance is structural: it is the last episode of the series' fourth run, it deliberately leaves Fisher's change unexplained, and it is the last episode in which the long-standing restaurant and police arrangement all appears together.