At the End of the Day

Spender is out with one of his daughters when he witnesses a ram raid: a vehicle driven into a shop front, and an elderly newspaper seller who intervenes and is brutally beaten for it. He does nothing. An old man is hurt in front of him while his child is beside him, and the whole episode runs on that failure rather than on any difficulty in the investigation. There is no mystery about who is to blame in the scene; the blame is the detective's, and he knows it.

The ram raids are a series of crimes rather than a single incident, so the case is built out of a pattern, but the pattern is not what the hour is really about. George Ellis and Sarah Ellis, played by James Garbutt and Jean Heywood, are the older characters at the centre of it, and the episode's concern is with ordinary people on the wrong end of violence while going about their day. The victims here are old, and the show's sympathy has always gone that way.

The second pressure comes from Gillespie, who wants Spender to arrest his criminal friends. After a season of building towards it, the new superior's agenda and Spender's method come into open conflict, and the standing arrangement with Stick and the wider criminal acquaintance is reframed as a problem for his career. The response is striking: Stick and Dan Boyd decide to track down villains on their own. With Spender compromised, the desk sergeant who has spent two years longing for adventure goes after the culprits with a criminal as his partner, which is an odd-couple arrangement the series touches almost nowhere else.

The third strand belongs to Frances, who is on jury duty and is being pressured towards a not guilty verdict. It is the same demand arriving from another direction. Spender is a police officer who watched a crime and did nothing; Frances is a juror being told how to vote; Gillespie is a manager who wants results that fit his account. All three are about what an institution does to a person inside it, and the criminal world applying pressure to the jury is the same world Spender is being told to drop.

The episode carries more pressure than it has room to develop. Three strands each want an hour of their own, and the ram-raid case, the one with an actual victim, is the one the record documents least: nobody names those responsible or says how it resolves. One fan account states the newspaper seller later dies; that claim is single-sourced and uncorroborated, so it is noted rather than asserted. What is certain is the closing position. The season ends with Spender disillusioned, his boss demanding he give up his friends, and the billing itself noting that Nail would return the following year.