Well, Well, Well

The last episode of the first series begins with its lead out of the city. Spender is summoned to London by Chief Inspector Greaves, and the summons is the reason he is in the wrong place when everything goes wrong. The whole shape of the hour depends on his absence.

While he is away, Stick gets caught up in a deal involving stolen jewellery and the man he was dealing with is murdered. Stick is arrested on suspicion of the killing. The case against him is circumstantial and serious: he was in the deal, the man is dead, and he is a convicted criminal with a history. This is the episode in which the most sympathetic character in the series becomes a suspect in a murder, and the billing itself puts the jeopardy plainly.

Spender comes back to find his friend in custody and clears him by working from outside the police case rather than through it. The force has the man it thinks did it, so the whole investigation has to be conducted against official conclusions rather than alongside them. It is the series' usual method turned inward: instead of going under cover to reach a criminal, he works to reach a truth about a friend who is, on the face of it, exactly what the police say he is. The killer is someone else, and the deal Stick was in is the reason he was exposed to the murder rather than the reason he committed it.

Sammy Johnson carries the episode, and it is the first time he has been given jeopardy rather than access. Across eight episodes Stick has been the man who makes Spender's cases possible. Here he is the man a case is being made about, and the shift gives Johnson the script's most substantial dramatic material. Peter Jonfield's Greaves is the institutional figure, not a villain: a senior officer who has a case, made the right call on the evidence, and is simply wrong. The episode is careful not to turn that into a conspiracy. The error is the ordinary error of a system reaching a reasonable conclusion from what it has.

The casting gives the criminal world a texture beyond the plot. Mick the Greek, Gypsy Lee, Mo Sample and the walk-on names like Pin Stripe and Denim suggest a functioning local underworld without requiring a cast of recurring villains. The domestic appearances are small and deliberate: Keith, Frances and both daughters are present, so the hour is set inside Spender's settled Newcastle life while the plot removes him from it. Yelland's run ends here, with his promotion taking him out of the series and DCS Gillespie arriving in January 1992. The first series closes on what Stick's choices can cost him rather than on a joke about them, which is a harder note than the show would usually allow itself.