Baptism

Three prisoners have escaped, and the first thing Chief Constable Cullen does is put the Task Force on high alert. Three men, out of custody and gone, with a derelict building as their hiding place. That narrows the hunt and raises the stakes at the same time: they are cornered, and cornered men are hard to predict. An escape is never routine, but three at once is news that moves a whole force. The immediate question is how they managed the breakout. The next is where they go from here.

Barlow leads the response, Watt works beside him, and Hawkins handles the ground. Jackson and Evans supply the manpower, Donald is there for the early stages of securing the area, and PC Snow deals with the crowds and the perimeter as the operation tightens. Supt. Leach and Tommy Abbott add weight to it, all of it moving under Cullen's command. Watching the ranks close in on that building, you get the sense of a whole department working as one. It is a manhunt run on discipline, and the discipline is the point.

Frank Cox directs from a script by Elwyn Jones. Stratford Johns is Barlow, Frank Windsor is Watt, Norman Bowler is Hawkins and Walter Gotell is Cullen. David Allister's Jackson and David Lloyd Meredith's Evans keep the ground covered, Susan Tebbs is PW Det. Con. Donald and Terence Rigby plays PC Snow. John Corvin is Supt. Leach, and Ian Hogg is Tommy Abbott.

The title promises a beginning, and the episode works as one: the squad lined up against men with nothing left to lose, no plan beyond a building and a deadline. But a manhunt is a slow business, and the show has the patience for it. The escapees make their own rules. The Task Force has to answer them.