Man Of Peace

A man from the past turns up in Thamesford with guns to sell, and the strangest part is where he takes the offer: straight to the police. Barlow is left to wonder what the man is playing at. But the answer carries the episode into territory the series does not usually visit.

The gun sale is the local crime; the Irish Republican connection is the current underneath it, and the two are bound together tightly enough that the squad cannot work the one without walking into the other. It is serious material, handled without sensation, and the episode earns its quiet tone. Allan McClelland's Tim Patrick and Anthony Booth's Smith stand at the centre of the affair, with Patricia Mort's Mrs Lane and Stanley Hollingsworth's Barlow's driver filling the edges.

Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor lead as Barlow and Watt, with David Lloyd Meredith's Evans, Terence Rigby's Snow and Brian Hall's Drake in support, and Radar, as always, on hand. The squad around them is a familiar one, and the familiarity is part of the point: ordinary policing asked to carry an extraordinary weight. Elwyn Jones wrote it alone this time, and Philip Dudley directed. It is the rare episode where the officers spend as much time choosing their words as choosing their moves.

The episode works because it keeps its scale small. A face from the past and a box of guns, with a question hanging over both that nobody wants to answer out loud. The resolution comes through the republican connection, and it lands with the weight of history rather than the snap of a twist. A sombre, serious hour, and the better for it. Sometimes the quiet cases are the loudest. Somewhere behind it all is a man who walked into a police station with a decision to make, and the hour respects how heavy that decision was.