There's Always Tomorrow

The red alert goes out early, and two operations that have taken weeks to set up are called off on the spot. That is the kind of episode this is: the day's plans are gone in an instant, and everything moves faster from then on. Special Branch pass the word that a young Saudi boy may be kidnapped, and the squad's job shifts from whatever it was doing to whatever must be done now. There is no time to ask whether the intelligence is sound. There is only time to act on it, and hope.

But the airport is where it comes apart. The situation is delicate and unresolved, and in the middle of it DCI Goldthorpe, the Special Branch man who brought the information, is shot dead. It is a sudden, blunt end to an operation that began as a piece of intelligence and finished as a killing. Elwyn Jones and Arnold Yarrow wrote it, Vere Lorrimer directed, and the tone stays cold and patient, which suits the material. The episode does not pause to mourn. It simply carries on, because that is what the job is.

Frank Windsor's Watt anchors the response, with Norman Bowler's Hawkins, Peter Childs's Grant, Terence Rigby's PC Snow, Peter Clough's PC Lincoln and John Flanagan's PC Pearson around him. David King is Goldthorpe, whose death is the hard centre of the hour, the point where a story about aborted operations and a possible kidnapping turns into something else. Denis Cleary's Joe Symes, Martyn Read's Cochrane and Martin Bax's Terrorist fill out the edges of a case file that will never quite be closed.

The show has always been honest about what police work costs, and here the cost is simple: a man doing his job at an airport, and a bullet. There is no neat answer, only the reminder that care and procedure do not always keep a man safe. The title promises tomorrow. For some people, the episode reminds you, there isn't one.