Smelling of Roses

Henry Crabbe loses his sense of smell. For a chef this is not an inconvenience but a professional catastrophe, and the episode's opening states the premise of the finale: the one man in Middleton who cannot be a detective without being a cook is losing the faculty his cooking depends on.

Fisher is meanwhile becoming obsessive about arresting Peter Watson, a tyre exporter. Crabbe is intrigued by Fisher's interest and suspects that Fisher, who is about to divorce his wife, is having an affair with Mrs Watson. That is where Crabbe's mind goes, and it is where the audience's mind is meant to go.

Crabbe's reading of Fisher is wrong. Valerie Watson has discovered that her husband is defrauding her charity, and she is using Fisher to trap him. Fisher's obsession is not an affair being covered up but a woman's plan being carried out with a police officer as the instrument. The case is therefore a fraud on a charity, and the person who initiated the investigation is its victim rather than its instigator. Crabbe sees the case through, and what he then understands is that Fisher has been using him, not for an affair but to catch Watson on Mrs Watson's terms. The sources do not describe how the fraud is exposed or what becomes of Peter Watson, and this article stops where they stop.

Crabbe resigns from the police. The resignation is not the forced arrangement of the first episode restated; it is Crabbe's own decision, taken because he has been made an instrument of someone else's purpose. He resigns once and for all. He immediately regains his sense of smell. The symptom is the story's measurement of the man: the loss of smell is the loss of the cook, and the moment the police career ends the cook comes back. The episode treats the illness as a physical reaction to a life he does not want and the cure as chosen rather than medical. Gary, meanwhile, turns down an offer of work at another kitchen and stays. The final movement, in the production's own synopsis, is that Henry and his staff and colleagues have every reason to drink to the continuing success of Pie in the Sky. The last scene is a toast to the restaurant. Crabbe is out of the police, the kitchen is intact and Gary has refused to leave, and the programme's last act gives Henry Crabbe what he has wanted since the first episode: the restaurant and nothing else.

The evidence that it was written as a finale is in the BBC's own series record, which bills the run as the final series, and in the structure, which resolves the founding premise: Crabbe became a reluctant policeman because Fisher blackmailed him, and he ends the arrangement on his own terms.

Malcolm Sinclair's Fisher has been the series' antagonist since the first episode, and the finale explains him: his judgement is not what his obsession is, and he has been used by a woman he was trying to help. Griffiths' performance is built on absence, and the return of the sense of smell at the moment of resignation is the series' most direct piece of symbolism, played as relief rather than revelation. Nicholas Lamont's Gary refusing the offer is the finale's second closure: the series has been about a man who gives people a chance in a kitchen, and the last episode confirms that the kitchen holds them.

The finale is constructed as a resolution of the series' premise rather than as a case. The loss of smell is the device that makes the choice legible: the audience is told what the police work costs him physically and then shown the cost coming off. There is no murder in it, which suits a programme that had never been primarily about murder. Its case is slight and the false-affair misdirection is a standard device the episode needs to give Crabbe a reason to be wrong, which is its honest weakness, and it is one of the few British comedy-dramas of the period that ended by resolving its own premise rather than leaving it in place.