Best Friends

Three strands run here, two professional and one domestic, and they cross in the middle. The principal case is a series of car thefts, worked by Spender and Boyd together. Boyd has spent the run as a desk-bound sergeant who wants the sort of adventure Spender gets, and this time the appetite gets him caught by the gang. It is the character's most exposed position in the season, and the episode does something the series had only flirted with before: it takes Boyd's running joke about wanting action and turns the consequence of it serious. The comedy's source is not abandoned, it is just paid for.

The second strand is the one that leaves a mark. Spender discovers that Emily, Keith Moreland's new girlfriend, is fifteen. She is an infatuated motorcycle courier, and Keith does not know she is still at school. Spender is the one who has to break the news to his friend, which puts him in the position he keeps ending up in, delivering damage to people he cares about. Lena Headey plays Emily as a young woman infatuated with an older man rather than as a plot device, which is why the revelation carries weight instead of reading as a contrivance. The series had set all three regulars up with new women in the opener, and this is where one of those relationships is shown to be impossible.

The third strand is Stick's. He opens a jewellery shop, his one serious attempt at going straight, and it is robbed on its first day in business. The robbery is the moment the series' retrospectives remember, because it is where the character's single move towards legitimacy is taken off him immediately.

What ties the three together is that all the damage falls on the regulars rather than on guest villains. Boyd is hurt through wanting the frontline, Keith through a relationship, Stick through his shop. It is one of the clearer examples of the show's parallel-structure habit, and the three blows land in the same hour.

The weak point is the finish. The car theft ring's fate is not recorded anywhere: how it is broken up and what happens to the gang after Boyd is caught are not stated, and the episode's summary exists mainly as a set of domestic misfortunes rather than as a case resolved. The credited parts of Ed the Ted, Cov Mick and DC Terry Knowles are not expanded beyond their billing either. What the episode does have is Headey, in an early screen role several years before her later career, and Stick's shop, which is the show's last word on whether he could ever leave his history behind.