The Apprentice

Fisher launches a campaign to make the police more popular with young people. Against that background, a boy called Nicky comes to Pie in the Sky claiming to be there for work experience. Henry uses him in the kitchen and Nicky impresses everyone. The till is then robbed and Nicky goes missing. He was not sent by any school: his claim of work experience was invented, and the disappearance and the theft arrive together.

Henry tracks Nicky down to a childhood haunt and establishes what has actually happened. Nicky's mother last saw him a week earlier, on the night an off-licence was robbed by a violent teenage gang. Nicky was bullied into joining the gang, and he now regrets it, proving it by leading them into a police trap. The gang, not Nicky, is responsible for the armed robbery; Nicky is a coerced member of it who repents and cooperates, and the trap he leads the gang into closes the case. The episode therefore ends with the boy who was the apparent culprit as the instrument of the solution. Which of the credited gang members is the leader is not established by the sources, and it is not inferred here.

The restaurant strand touches the case directly, because Nicky is inside the restaurant as a supposed apprentice when the money goes missing. As with the previous series' finale, the crime occurs on the premises and the kitchen is the scene rather than a parallel story, so the format's two halves collapse into one.

Kevin Bishop's Nicky has to be plausible both as a willing apprentice in a working kitchen and as a boy being pulled into a gang, and the script gives him the second function only after the first has been established, so that his competence in the kitchen is genuine and his other life is not. The casting is the episode's production story: Bishop went on to a substantial comedy career, Kelly Reilly, playing Tina, later became a lead in Yellowstone, and Dani Harmer, credited among the twin schoolgirls, went on to play Tracy Beaker for the BBC. Morag Fullarton's direction gives the kitchen scenes a domestic ease that makes the discovery about Nicky land harder, and Fisher's youth-engagement campaign is the episode's institutional joke: a police force trying to present itself as approachable at the same time as a boy in its orbit is being coerced by a gang.

The subject is a child in trouble, which the series had attempted before and does again here in a lower key, and the theme is coercion: Nicky is not a criminal but a boy who has been made to act like one, and the episode is unambiguous that the gang is at fault and he is not. The tone is among the warmer of the final run, with the kitchen scenes played for pleasure and the resolution a rehabilitation. The boy-joins-a-gang-and-repents structure is familiar and the episode does not complicate it, since Nicky's rehabilitation is asserted at the end rather than shown, which is its weakness. What it does well is test the series' oldest idea, that the kitchen is a place where people are given second chances, on a child, having already tested it on Steve Turner and on Gary Palmer.