The Promised Land

A small boat comes ashore on a Kent beach in the dark and unloads people who are not meant to be there. The police are waiting, more or less: the smugglers are scooped up, and so are most of the arrivals. But one man slips away in the confusion. Majid is ill, genuinely ill, and instead of a cell he ends up in the care of Alex Rushmer, an immigrant rights activist who takes him in. It is the kind of arrival that leaves no trace by morning, except for the man it leaves behind.

The episode runs on the tension between those two facts. The law has done its job, and one sick man has fallen through the net into the hands of someone who thinks the law has got the whole job wrong. For once the Branch are chasing a paperwork problem with a heartbeat, and nobody on either side looks entirely comfortable about it. Rushmer has no part in the smuggling. He simply made a decision about a sick stranger, and the episode lets that decision stand.

Trevor Preston wrote it, Dennis Vance directed. Wensley Pithey is Detective Supt. Eden, Derren Nesbitt Det. Chief Insp. Jordan and Keith Washington Det. Const. Morrissey. Dino Shafeek plays Majid, Geoffrey Bayldon Alex Rushmer, with Martin Wyldeck's Spaak, Arnold Peters' Giraud, Mary Healey's Rosa, Robert Hamilton's Zac and Windsor Davies' Vousden filling out the edges of the story.

'The Promised Land' works best as a small, awkward tale. The beach landing is dramatic, but the drama quietly moves indoors, to a sick man on a sofa and the question of who gets to decide what happens to him next. There is no neat arrest to round it off, and that feels right. Whatever the law makes of him, Majid is the one who got away, and the show is quietly glad of it.