Here We Go Again

The second series opens with Spender in place and unsettled. His new superior, DCS Gillespie, has not arrived yet, and in the meantime he is standing guard over visiting government ministers he has no interest in. He is impatient with the assignment, impatient for the new boss, and waiting for Stick to come out of Durham prison. The episode gives its lead a job he does not want and then lets the real story happen somewhere else.

Stick is released into a city that moved on without him. A former cellmate, Spud Tate, is waiting, and Stick takes to driving him around. The pair are drawn into a local vendetta which escalates into fire bombings, and Spender, who is supposed to be minding ministers, ends up working the bombings instead. The structure is a divided man: professionally committed to a protective detail he despises while his closest friend is at the centre of a criminal dispute on his own patch.

Peter Guinness arrives as Gillespie and the relationship is set up as a clash from the outset. Gillespie wants tighter control and is sceptical of Spender's methods, and the archived billing makes clear he is expected but not yet in place, so his first scenes carry the weight of something beginning rather than continuing. He is a different proposition from Paul Greenwood's Yelland: where Yelland was merely unsympathetic, Gillespie is a manager with an agenda, and the season tests it week by week. Mickey Hutton's Spud attaches himself to Stick and stays for five episodes across two series, while Rod Culbertson's Denny is the man who has taken over part of the criminal market in Stick's absence.

Two other developments set the board. Frances has a new man in her life, which Spender cannot control and cannot police, and the domestic cast settles around that arrangement rather than around any hope of a reconciliation. And the policing itself is shown as an imposition rather than a vocation, with its own officer wishing he were somewhere else entirely.

The honest problem is that an opener with this much to install has little room to develop any one thing. Three new or near-new regulars, a new superior, a relocated domestic situation and a vendetta all have to be put in place, and the protection detail taking up most of Spender's screen time is the thread with the least consequence. What the episode does establish is where the series' real centre lies: the Stick material is the spine and the police work is the frame around it. It is not a favourite episode of the run, and it is a clear statement of intent.