Not With A Bang...

The title borrows its rhythm from Eliot's Hollow Men, and the episode makes good on the joke: a lot of talk about explosives, and not much of a bang. For a season opener it is a quiet gamble, and it pays off. Informant Alf Bowen tells Harry Hawkins that two men are after explosives, the squad mounts the operation, and apart from a failed break-in at a quarry, nothing happens. But nothing is doing a lot of work here.

Bowen, it turns out, is playing both sides. The men he has informed on have realised it, and they mean to kill him, so Bowen, a resourceful man when cornered, starts setting booby traps and making his own arrangements. Bill Dean plays him with a sweaty, desperate energy, the kind of informant who makes every room he is in feel unsafe, and who has to be more afraid of his friends than of the police. John Humphry's Knight and Roger Avon's Cummings are the men on the other end of the deal, and the police, Watt, Hawkins, Det. Sgt. Grant, played by Peter Childs, Snow, Lincoln, PC Pearson and WPC Bartle, are trying to keep a lid on a situation that keeps slipping.

Elwyn Jones wrote it, Gilchrist Calder directed. The failed break-in at the quarry is the kind of lead that dies on the doorstep, and the squad's frustration is quietly funny. The episode is a portrait of an informant running out of room, and Bill Dean makes every exit look like a man checking the doors. The episode is patient about it, letting the tension come from Bowen's panic rather than from explosions.

It is a strong season opener in the series' quieter register: no bombs go off and nobody gets shot; the danger is all in what might have been. And the best line of the episode is in the title, because the world, in this story, does not end with a bang at all.