The One That Got Away

Before Rockliffe and his team can start looking for three villains who got away, they must first find out who they were, and three of the recruits have selection boards for the Detective Training School on their minds. The last episode of the eighteen is the only one whose two halves are both about the future.

The first half is the format's hardest puzzle: three fugitives the squad cannot name, which makes detection a matter of identification before it is anything else. The second half is the pay-off of the series' founding idea, since the babies of the title are finally being assessed for the detective course in the final hour of the run.

The guest cast puts the run's highest concentration of rank on screen: Frank Windsor as Commander Wills, John Woodvine as Detective Chief Superintendent Gardner and Bernard Gallagher as Chief Superintendent Hodgkiss, three officers senior to Malcolm Terris's Munro. Their presence indicates how closely the squad's progress is being watched from above. An episode about assessment needs the people who do the assessing, and the finale supplies them.

Leonard Lewis directed the second series' first and last episodes and produced all eighteen, which gives the 1988 run a shape bookended by its own producer. The script is Richard O'Keeffe's, his ninth of the eighteen, and the creator went on to write the character's rural successor later the same year.

No third series of this title was made. The trade paper's February 1988 report that the show was to be retooled into a rural police series describes the pivot, and Rockliffe's Folly followed on 2 November 1988 with a new setting in Wessex and a new cast around Ian Hogg. The report is a reported claim rather than an explanation from the BBC, and no source records why the London show ended.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode, and nothing records which three recruits face the boards or what the boards decide. The run stops on the verge of its own conclusion, which is the most apt ending a training series could have had.

Its afterlife is at least documented: Network released all eighteen episodes in a 2017 set that excludes the rural series, Ian Hogg's actor page on this site is activated by this entry, and the retrospectives treat the show as derivative of The Bill while remembering its star as a forerunner of the harder police antiheroes that followed.