Retreat

The episode goes into a prison. Spender works under cover as a prisoner to investigate the murder of a key witness: a protected person has been killed, and he is put inside the walls to find out what happened and who arranged it. He shares a cell with Robert Cunningham, played by Timothy Spall, a prisoner the retrospectives describe as a tragic case he is investigating. The prison material was later recalled as the season's bleakest, and it confines the show's most expansive character to a cell for the final regular episode.

Against that runs a lighter strand. Stick flees Newcastle when he falls behind with his rent, which is his own version of a retreat, and the two halves of the hour are both about men getting out of the way of their troubles, one by design and one by accident. Stick's flight is the comic counterweight to Spender's confinement, and he ends the season having decided to give up crime, a turn one retrospective describes as his taking the unusual step of becoming a Buddhist.

Then the series does the thing it had been building towards. Frances, Spender's ex-wife, is killed by a bomb planted in Spender's car by a vengeful businessman. The device was meant for him and it kills her instead. The ground had been prepared: Frances had been about to leave Eric and return to Spender, and his relationship with Janet Thornton had already hit trouble, so the show had looked like it was arranging a happy ending and then took it away. The woman who was going to come back to him dies in his place.

That single act repays the whole run's investment in his family, and it is one of the two plot facts the reference summaries single out about the series. It also completes the pattern set in the opener of this series: every new relationship introduced there has now failed, and Spender's own has run into difficulty. The show handles the loss through consequence rather than reflection, and the closing position is that the two things he wanted, the work and the family, could not be had together.

The weakness is where the bomb comes from. It is a sudden act of violence delivered by a businessman whose setup arrives late in the season, so the cause carries much less weight than the effect, and the identity of that businessman is not named in any source. Nor is it recorded whether the murderer of the key witness is identified or brought to justice within the episode. One forum account claims Stick's orange Beetle is destroyed here; that is single-sourced and unverified. Timothy Spall's performance as Cunningham gives the prison strand its centre, and Denise Welch, who had been a regular since the first episode, is at the heart of the outcome without being in the investigation. Boyd appears in the last regular instalment before his absence from the special, which is felt.