Error of Judgement

Inman notices that a group calling itself The Guardians is taking more than a passing interest in a circle of pro-germ-warfare campaigners. That alone would be worth a file. What tips it over is the discovery that the campaigners' leader is a young woman, Angela Ballie, and Inman decides Jordan should go and question her. The rest of the episode is that conversation, and everything it sets in motion.

Peter Hill wrote it and Guy Verney directed, and the episode gets a lot of mileage out of a simple interview. Jordan turns up expecting a crank and finds himself dealing with someone the file did not prepare him for. Around her sit the people of the group: Robert, Brian Daniels, a woman called Mrs Young, and Colonel Harkstead, whose presence gives the whole business an uncomfortable military edge. There is a whiff of the old school about it all, watchers and watched both sure they are right.

And the title does the work of a warning label. Somewhere in that room, a judgement goes wrong, and the episode trusts the viewer to spot the moment it happens. What Jordan gets out of her, and what she gets out of him, is the quiet engine of the hour.

Derren Nesbitt's Jordan and Fulton Mackay's Inman anchor it, with Morris Perry as Moxon, Miranda Connell as Angela Ballie, Basil Dignam as Colonel Harkstead, Anne Rutter as Det. Con. Jane Simpson, John Boxer as Inspector Dunwell, John Richmond as Robert, Robert Aldous as Brian Daniels and Gabrielle Blunt as Mrs Young.

A quiet episode, really: one interrogation, a handful of rooms, a young woman who is not what the paperwork said. The mistake, when it comes, is human rather than spectacular, and nobody in the building knows it has happened until it is too late. It is small on spectacle and large on unease, which suits the subject.