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An SA plane is hijacked, and the Task Force is pitched straight into the aftermath. Armed security on board wound two of the hijackers and arrest a third, and by the time the aircraft is down the immediate crisis is over. But John Watt is not satisfied. Once the tarmac clears, he starts to wonder which of the accounts he has been given is the one that does not hold up. Watt has seen too many tidy endings to trust this one.

That is the real subject of the episode. The hijacking is the excuse; the investigation is about trust, or the lack of it. Watt has a gift for treating a successful rescue like a failed alibi, and he works through everyone connected with the incident with the same polite, stubborn disbelief. Hawkins backs him up, Cullen hovers at the edges of authority, and the uniforms, Evans, Snow, Nesbitt and Dodds, hold the routine together while their chief superintendent goes looking for the lie. The interview scenes are where the episode earns its keep, and Windsor gives Watt the stillness of a man who has already decided that something is wrong.

Diane Keen, a name that would become very familiar on British television, plays Susan Gleaner, with Haydn Wood's Forrest and James Leith's Jake among the faces circling the case. Keen is good value in a role that mostly consists of waiting to be doubted.

Elwyn Jones wrote it, David Wickes directed, and Wickes keeps the whole thing moving at a clip that suits the airport setting. The hijack itself is handled briskly; the aftermath takes its time, and the pacing is the point. It is a solid season opener, brisk and slightly paranoid in the right measure.

The interesting choice is to take the danger off the aircraft and put it into the interview rooms, where a hijack becomes a matter of who said what and when. High stakes, personal untruths, and a chief superintendent who can smell a cover-up before anyone has finished telling it. That is the series doing what it does best.