Ugly Customers

Crabbe and the Public Duties Squad are assigned to guard a jury. The jury is deliberating in a fraud case and has been sequestered in a hotel, described in the sources as the garish Luxor and in the production's own words as the hotel from hell. The assignment is protection work rather than investigation, which is the new unit's standing arrangement.

The jury is squabbling, and someone is intimidating the jurors. Crabbe, unable to leave the job at guard duty, sets out to establish who is applying the pressure and, more importantly, how the villain is getting to the jurors at all. A sequestered jury is by definition out of contact with the outside world, so the method of contact is the puzzle, and the answer has to be a route around the sequestration itself.

Crabbe identifies who is intimidating the jurors and how the contact is being made. The fraud trial's outcome is not the point; the point is that the jury was reachable. The sources do not name the culprit or describe the method, and neither is supplied here.

The restaurant strand gives Sally a difficult customer. The billing calls him a sex pest, and Wikipedia records that Sally learns to get the better of him. This is Marsha Thomason's first substantial material as the new waitress, and the episode's second story about pressure applied to people who are there to do a job. The series chooses not to make Crabbe her rescuer, which establishes her as a character with her own competence rather than a new version of Nicola.

Crabbe also comes to the aid of the hotel's cook, Andrew Vernon, who is cruelly oppressed by a jobsworth manager. This is the episode's clearest statement of the series' values: two men who care about food, one of them trapped in an institution that does not, and the detective siding with the cook rather than investigating him. John Thomson plays the part, and casting a well-known comic performer as a serious man in a bad kitchen gives the strand a specific weight.

The episode works as a locked-room problem in institutional form, since a sequestered jury is a group deliberately isolated and the crime is that the isolation is not working. That is a more interesting puzzle than the series usually sets, and its solution depends on finding the channel of contact rather than on identifying a motive. The theme is pressure on people doing a job: jurors, a waitress and a cook, all three of the episode's strands about someone being leaned on, with the series' sympathies consistently with the person being leaned on rather than the person applying the weight. The comedy is in the terrible hotel, the squabbling jury and the jobsworth manager, and the intimidation is a fraud case rather than a killing. Inside Pulse's judgement that the episode wastes Crabbe's talent by making him a mere guard is a fair note, since the assignment is deliberately demeaning and the joke that he is overqualified is repeated often enough that the humour wears thin.