Whose Side Are You On?

PC Raven is attacked in a local nightclub, and the attack lands differently because it is the third time a policeman has been assaulted in two weeks. Nightclubs in this series are never good news for the uniformed branch. Hawkins leads the inquiry with the weight of that pattern on him, and Mrs Raven wants answers, which she is not shy about demanding. The question in the title is aimed as much at the police as at the public. Two weeks, three officers: the pattern is the story before anyone has said a word.

Terence Rigby's Snow gets the other job: escorting a Commonwealth detective, playing diplomat while his colleagues chase the nightclub case. It is a nice counterpoint, the visitor treated with courtesy while back home the force is under threat. Clifton Jones' Insp. Wallace, David Bailie's Scooby and Mary Larkin's Mrs Raven fill out the company, with Watt, Hawkins, Cullen, Dodds, Perry and WPC Arthur keeping the institutional side steady.

Elwyn Jones and Arnold Yarrow wrote it, Lennie Mayne directed. The episode is strongest on the way a series of attacks changes the mood inside a force: the solidarity, the sudden suspicion of anyone not in uniform. And the pressure keeps building on the man leading the inquiry, and Norman Bowler is good at the weariness of it. The Commonwealth detective never becomes a plot device; he is a pair of official eyes on the whole affair. Mrs Raven's demand for answers is the human cost made visible, and the episode does not let the case file bury it.

It is not a whodunit so much as a portrait of a force under strain, and the show does that better than almost anyone. It is the kind of episode that rewards a rewatch, because the title question reads differently the second time. And the title earns its question mark, because by the end it is genuinely unclear whose side some of the people in the room are on.