Cutting the Mustard

Henry and the squad are called to a private boarding school after Alex Stillwell, the son of police Commander Colin Stillwell, is beaten up by local youths. The assignment is a favour to a senior officer as much as a job, and it puts the unit inside an institution that does not want them there.

Henry meets a wall of insular hostility from the school. Alex then points him to another pupil, who has been blackmailing the Chemistry teacher into manufacturing Ecstasy tablets which the pupil is selling around the school. The violence that brought the squad in therefore has a different cause from the one assumed, and the beating is separate from the drug trade rather than at its centre. Crabbe identifies the pupil running the trade and the teacher being blackmailed, and the school is exposed for what has been happening in it. The sources do not name the pupil, and this article does not supply a name; the credited cast includes two characters with the same surname played by different actors, which suggests a relationship the sources do not explain.

On the restaurant side, Gary creates a new blend of mustard, which attracts the attention of a large food manufacturer who offers to market it. The manufacturer wants to alter the recipe to make it taste blander. Gary, taking the lead from Crabbe, puts his culinary principles first and tells the company the deal is off. This is a direct echo of the series' premise: Crabbe has spent five series declining to compromise on food, and here his apprentice declines the same compromise, with the episode treating Gary's refusal as the point at which he has become Crabbe's colleague rather than his employee.

Gary's part in this episode is the most substantial piece of regular-character development in the final run. Nicholas Lamont had played him since Series 3 as the young chef who came to the kitchen as an ex-offender given a chance, and here he is offered a route out and turns it down on the same grounds Crabbe would. The episode does not make a speech of it, which is why it works. Crabbe's difficulty is the one the series keeps returning to: the school answers to a Commander, the squad is there as a favour, and the institution's first instinct is to close ranks. The episode's argument is that the cover-up inside a school is a form of the same institutional loyalty that protects bad officers.

The episode is the series' one school story and its subject is how institutions protect themselves. The attack on the Commander's son is the visible offence, the drug manufacture and the blackmail of a teacher are the hidden one, and the school's hostility to the investigators is what allows the hidden offence to continue. The comedy is largely gone here, because this is one of the more serious episodes of the run, with a drug-supply plot and a coerced member of staff, and the lightness sits in the restaurant strand, where a man stands up for his mustard. The two-strand echo is the episode's strength: Crabbe is outvoted by an institution that will not hear an unwelcome finding while Gary refuses a deal because it would degrade his product, and the episode argues for the same thing in both halves. Its weakness is that the school is drawn as a single hostile unit and the large guest cast of schoolboys and masters is too much for fifty minutes, so the culprit is identified more than characterised.