Operation Nadine (2)

The second half of Operation Nadine keeps Jane Tennison in the middle of the same storm. The murder inquiry in the African Caribbean community is still running, the prejudice is still there on the streets and inside her own team, and DS Robert Oswalde is still the man she used to be involved with. Every interview, every briefing, every casual remark carries a second meaning.

The community does not trust the police, and the police are doing their best to justify it. But Jane keeps working the case the way she always does, asking the questions the local force would rather she dropped. The suspicion that she has been handed a plum case or hung out to dry never quite goes away. It is the kind of assignment where success gets measured in arrests, and nobody is arresting anyone. Jane finds herself defending the inquiry in briefings where the only question anyone asks is when it will be over. Every day without an arrest is a day someone gets to say she was never up to the job.

Allan Cubitt and Lynda La Plante wrote it, John Strickland directed, and it aired on 16 December 1992. Helen Mirren's Jane is joined by Colin Salmon as DS Robert Oswalde, John Benfield as DSU Michael Kernan, Jack Ellis as DI Tony Muddyman, Craig Fairbrass as DI Frank Burkin, Richard Hawley as DS Richard Haskons, Philip Wright as DC Lillie, Ian Fitzgibbon as DC Jones, Andrew Tiernan as DC Rosper and Stafford Gordon as Commander Trayner.

The mystery at the centre of the episode is not who killed the girl. It is whether the force investigating her death can see past its own assumptions long enough to care. Jane is still trying. And as long as she is trying, the case has a chance of being something other than a box ticked.