Dog Eat Dog

PC Snow tries a kindness. He befriends a troubled youngster, giving the boy a pet dog in the hope that the animal will do what words have not managed, and for a while it seems to work. Then the boy's father kills the dog, and Snow is left with the worst possible version of being proved right about a family. The gesture is exactly the sort of thing a good beat constable would try, and the failure of it lands hard.

The episode watches Snow deal with that. A policeman's training tells him the law has its own pace and its own answers. But the man in him wants something faster and harder, and he starts to consider taking the law into his own hands. It is a short, sharp story about the line between the two, and Terence Rigby plays Snow's struggle without letting it get sentimental. The episode keeps the violence off-screen, where it belongs, and concentrates on the silence afterwards. Snow's anger is the quiet kind, and the story trusts the viewer to see how close he is to the edge. Windsor Davies' Harry Talbot is the father who does the killing, Greg Smith's Colin Talbot the boy caught between, and Freddie Clemson's Robey hovers around the edges.

Frank Windsor's Watt and David Lloyd Meredith's Evans keep the professional side of things visible, with Thomas Ellice's Knowles alongside Snow. Ewart Alexander and Elwyn Jones wrote it, Paul Ciappessoni directed, and it went out on 4 October 1972.

The cruelty is the point, and the show does not soften it. What Snow does next is left to the viewer to judge, which is the right call for an episode built on a private decision. It is a small, bleak story, and it lingers. It is the kind of episode the series was quietly proud of, one that gives a supporting player the whole stage.