Its Ugly Head

The title is about an injury and a comeback. PW Det. Con. Donald was hurt making an arrest, and now she is back on duty with colleagues watching to see whether she is still up to it. The episode is about that return, and the need to prove she has not been changed by the beating she took. The injury happened during an arrest, which makes the return doubly pointed: the same job that put her out is the job she has to walk back into. The comeback is the case, and the case is the comeback.

There is no grand villain to focus the drama. The test is subtler, and the show trusts the viewer to see it: a capable officer having to demonstrate, all over again, that she is capable. Nothing in the script announces the test. It is all in the way the other officers watch her, and in the way she watches herself. Every interaction becomes a measurement of whether she belongs back among them, a quiet study of trust inside a working unit. And that is harder television to make than a shoot-out, because the action is all internal.

Elwyn Jones wrote it and Leonard Lewis directed. Stratford Johns is Barlow, Frank Windsor is Watt and Norman Bowler is Hawkins. Walter Gotell is Cullen, David Lloyd Meredith is Evans, Terence Rigby is PC Snow and Caroline Rogers is Sybil. Susan Tebbs returns as Donald, with Ian Sharp as Bernard Pinks and Michael Goodliffe as Grenville.

The drama here is only partly a case. It is the awkward business of coming back, and of everyone pretending not to be checking on you. The injury is never forgotten; it is what everyone is really looking at. The show rarely gets enough credit for episodes like this, where the villain is invisible and the drama is in the doing of the job.