A New Face

Peter Harris has come home from university with more than a degree. The son of Det. Chief Insp. Matt Harris has been radicalised, and he is trying to join a gang of riot-minded militant socialist students who are not planning to do their protesting quietly. For his father, a trusted officer, the boy's new politics is not an abstract worry. It threatens to break up the family and to end a career. It is the kind of trouble that walks through the front door. The Branch watches its own, and the watching starts at home.

The episode is domestic drama wearing a security-police coat. The Branch cannot ignore the son of one of their own. The family, for its part, is being torn apart by what he has become. Margot and Sean drift around the edges of Peter's new life, and Mrs. Harris watches her household split down the middle while her husband tries to hold the two halves together. The university years are supposed to settle a young man, not set him alight. There are no defectors in this one and no coded messages. The danger has a bedroom in it. Recruitment, in this story, happens over dinner tables and in common rooms.

Roy Bottomley and Tom Brennand wrote it, Peter Duguid directed. Wensley Pithey is Det. Supt. Eden, Derren Nesbitt Det. Chief Insp. Jordan, with Jennifer Wilson's Det. Sgt. Helen Webb, Morris Perry's Charles Moxon and Keith Washington's Det. Con. Morrissey. Anthony Sagar plays Det. Chief Insp. Matt Harris, Doreen Mantle Mrs. Harris, Andy Bradford Peter Harris, Nicola Pagett Margot and Tom Chadbon Sean.

But there is no spy at the bottom of this one, and that is the point. The threat is a boy with a cause, and the hardest part for his father is that the boy is sincere. You cannot charge anyone with that. The episode's quiet ending is the honest one.