Domestic Incident

PC Snow answers a call to a block of flats and finds a woman in a bad way. Her ex-partner, George Fletcher, described as psychotic, has tracked her down and is holding his own children hostage, threatening to kill them. It is a domestic call that turns into a siege. But the whole episode stays inside the building.

That is the point of it. No car chases, no warehouse rooftops. The drama is corridors and landings. Neighbours hover at doors while one man sits inside a flat with his children, having already made his threats. Nobody is going anywhere, and everybody knows it. Watt takes the lead, Hawkins backs him, and the uniforms, Snow, Nesbitt, Dodds and WPC Gregg, do the patient, dangerous work of keeping everyone calm and waiting for Fletcher to make a move.

The writing comes from Elwyn Jones and Alan Plater, a pairing that guarantees the dialogue will be sharper than the situation deserves. David Sullivan Proudfoot directs, and the supporting cast, Maggie McCarthy's WPC Gregg, Rachel Herbert and Kenneth Oxtoby as the Blacks, keeps the building feeling lived-in. Mark Moss's Walker is the neighbour with opinions about everything and help for none of it.

The details are small and right: a landing full of people who have nowhere else to be, a woman at the centre of it who called for help and got a full squad. It is the kind of call that never makes the headlines, which is exactly why the show does it. The episode never leaves the stairwell, and it does not need to.

It is claustrophobic in the way the best of these stories are, a single building and a family in crisis, and it earns its tension the hard way, by staying put. The flat is the trap, and everyone inside it, police included, is waiting for George Fletcher to decide what he does next.