Execution

Shots at the house of Billy Baxter, and for once it is the minder who is on the floor, not the boss. Evans and PC Nesbitt are first on the scene, arriving to find Baxter's minder shot and his girlfriend Clare terrified. The old gangland figure himself is still alive, and that is the problem. Whoever fired the shots missed their real target, and Watt and Hawkins share the same cold thought: Baxter will be next. The old man's luck has held so far, but luck is not a plan.

The episode works on the clock of that fear. Every hour that passes without a lead is an hour closer to a second attempt, and the squad's job becomes as much about keeping a man alive as catching his would-be killers. Peter Arne plays Baxter as an aging predator who can see the end of his own era in the shape of the men coming for him. Fiona Lewis's Clare is the witness who saw too much and may not say so, and around them move Monty, Mac, Johnny and Gerry, played by Leslie Schofield, William Dysart, Bill Lyons and Peter Baldwin, the usual faces of a gangland that is busy eating itself.

Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, Roderick Graham directed, and Graham keeps the pace tight without hurrying the hour. It is one of the series' more openly violent premises, and the show handles it without flinching, the way it always did.

"Execution" earns its title honestly. The episode is not really about the shooting that has happened; it is about the one everyone can feel coming. That sense of an inevitable, approaching act gives the hour its weight, and the performances keep it grounded. It is a hard, unsentimental piece of television about a world where the old order is being told, in the bluntest possible terms, that its time is up.