Intercept

"Intercept" gives Craven a puzzle with a sour taste. Morales is a foreign VIP whose help matters to Britain, and someone has just relieved him of a fortune in diamonds. But the awkward part is that Morales looks nearly as crooked as the men who robbed him. Craven's job is to find out which is true, and the episode enjoys watching him hold both ideas at once. The question is how far a decent man should go to keep an indecent one on side.

Walter Gotell plays Morales with the smooth menace he was born for; years later he would take up residence in Moscow as General Gogol to Roger Moore's Bond, and he makes a fine shady asset here too. Around him the cast is properly London: John Bindon's Harry Beauchamp, Michael Da Costa's Tony Compson, Patrick Duggan's Paddy Regan, Peter Miles's Rodriguez and Maxwell Shaw's Hodges, with Susan Jameson's Detective Sgt. Mary Holmes holding down the office end alongside Sewell, Mower and Eddington. Bindon was an actor whose own reputation for mixing with the wrong people never needed much help from a script. Holmes and Hodges give the office scenes a grounding that the flashier company never quite manages.

Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, William Brayne directed. The script has fun with the moral arithmetic: Britain needs this man, and needing him means swallowing whatever he actually is. Diamond heists are never just diamond heists in this series, and the episode leans into the old truth that you cannot do business with a crook without ending up on his books. The diamonds themselves matter less than the company they keep.

It is a competent, cynical hour, and the cynicism is the point. The best line in it is the premise itself, and the episode never quite tops it. That is not a complaint; the premise is a good one.