Dinner Date

Jordan flies to Frankfurt to bring home Selby, a British subject who dropped out of official sight three years ago in East Germany. The Government are anxious to know what he has been up to since, which is a polite way of saying they want a full account of his time behind the Curtain. And the Russian KGB are hanging around the edges of the trip, so nobody pretends this will be a simple escort.

The episode works as a long, careful exercise in watching. Selby is met and handed over and talked to, and all the while someone on the British side is noting who looks at him twice. A small procession of figures complicates the job of repatriation: Otto Pohl, Christine Morris, Bauer, Richter, a hotel manager who seems to remember everything that crosses his desk. Every meeting suggests Selby's three lost years were never clean or straightforward, and that those years are the whole point. Nobody at the table says quite what they mean, and the viewer has to read between the lines along with Jordan.

George Markstein wrote it and William G. Stewart directed, and the pair keep the tension in the silences rather than in gunfire. Much of the running time is spent in airport lounges and hotel corridors, which is honest to the job. Escorting a man who may be a defector or a plant is mostly a question of who is watching whom, and the episode trusts the viewer to keep score. There is no shootout to tidy things up.

Derren Nesbitt's Jordan anchors it, with Fulton Mackay as Inman, Morris Perry as Moxon, Keith Washington as Morrissey, Frederick Jaeger as Pohl, Sandra Bryant as Christine Morris, John Bailey as Bauer, David Hargreaves as Richter and Arnold Diamond as the Hotel Manager.

It never quite says what Selby was doing for those three years, and that vagueness is the point. A mission that looked like bringing someone home turns out to be far more complicated than that.