A Trip to the Zoo

Members of Rockliffe's crime squad make hasty character assessments, deciding that Wayne is an animal and Chris is a charmer, and both judgments have to be revised on closer inspection. The premise is the run's most openly thematic, and it is a neat match for a series about probationers who are themselves being assessed every week.

The episode turns the squad's judgement into the subject rather than the plot. A group of young officers deciding what people are, and being wrong, is the format's real business: the series is about how quickly police work forces conclusions and how often they are wrong, and this hour says so directly.

Danny Cunningham is credited as Wayne Hagerty, which attaches the first of the two assessments to a named character. Nobody identifies Chris in any cast record available, which is a gap worth stating plainly: the second of the two judged men exists in the published summary and nowhere else, and a named assessment in a summary ought to correspond to a credited part.

The full seven recruits are on duty, and neither Flight nor Munro appears, which leaves Brian Croucher's Chief Superintendent Wyatt as the only officer above Rockliffe. That configuration, the squad and the Chief Superintendent with no inspector in between, is the second series' most common arrangement and it puts a uniformed rank directly against the plain-clothes squad.

Clive Fleury directed three episodes of the second series, of which this is the first, and the production is unchanged from 1987: videotape, Kensal Rise locations, Canalot Studios interiors, Leonard Lewis producing and Joan Clark script-editing. The absence of a senior detective also means the squad reports to a uniformed officer whose judgements are not investigative, which is a pressure the plain-clothes recruits notice.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode, and no source records what the two revised judgments lead to. What can be said is that an episode built on misjudgement is the most self-aware piece of writing in the run, since it makes the audience watch the same process the series puts its recruits through.

The title is the giveaway. A trip to the zoo implies a party of visitors looking at animals, and the episode's interest is in who is being looked at and who has decided what the animals are. It is a joke the series could only make about itself, since the squad spends every episode being watched by somebody with more rank.