No Way

Bank robberies usually begin somewhere else. The one in "No Way" begins on the pavement, because Watt, Hawkins and Evans are coming straight off a protection unit job when the alarm goes up at a bank in Thamesford. Before anyone can think, it is a shooting, and then it is worse than that: Hawkins wounds one of the robbers, and John Watt is taken hostage. The protection unit, the bank, the shot: a textbook morning gone sideways, and the rest of the hour is spent putting it back together.

The rest of the episode is the unglamorous business of getting a senior officer out alive without getting him killed in the process. Chief Constable Cullen hovers over the operation, Knowles and Nesbitt hold the line outside, and behind the police cordon the series keeps its eye on the smaller world of the people who wait and worry: Jean Watt, Bertie Cooper, Mrs Marshall and Lennie Cooper. Barry Jackson's Bertie is worth watching. He does a lot with very little. The negotiation, such as it is, is done in rooms and on telephones, and the episode knows that stillness is its best weapon.

Tony Hoare and Elwyn Jones wrote it, Michael Hayes directed. Frank Windsor is Watt, Norman Bowler Hawkins, and Walter Gotell brings a cold seniority to Cullen. David Lloyd Meredith's Evans, Thomas Ellice's Knowles and Grahame Mallard's Nesbitt round out the squad, with Robert Hamilton's Lennie and Elizabeth Bell's Mrs Marshall at the edges and Gay Hamilton's Jean Watt at home.

A hostage is only as safe as the man holding the gun, and the episode never lets you forget it. But it is the small choices that carry the hour, the ones made by people who are not in the robbery at all, and who will still live with its ending. There is no clever twist on offer, and none is needed.