Episode 5

Two scandals arrive in the same week. The first is a book: disgraced MP Hampton Wilder has written memoirs with the power to bring down the government, and the government knows it. Every page is a threat, and the civil servants know it. The second is older and shadier. Sergei Lermov, an old KGB hand, is running illegal arms in and out of the country, and the trail leads toward the Prime Minister's right-hand man, whose good name is quietly being ruined by association. The two plots run on different clocks, and the episode keeps them from colliding until it wants them to. It's the quiet workhorse of the season, and that's a compliment.

The episode shuttles between the two with a confidence the series was still earning in these early weeks. The Wilder business is Westminster stuff, all bad faith and careful wording. But the arms plot is proper espionage, the kind where a single misstep gets somebody killed. Watching the two lines converge is most of the fun, and the show makes the convergence feel inevitable without making it feel easy. The KGB thread especially feels like the series warming up its muscles for bigger games to come.

Howard Brenton and David Wolstencroft wrote it; Andy Wilson directed. David Calder's Lermov brings old-school menace, and Nicholas Farrell's Richard Maynard has the Westminster polish. Peter Firth's Harry supplies the weary supervision the series was built on, with Jenny Agutter, Keeley Hawes and Esther Hall doing the heavy lifting alongside and Mark Dexter's Mark Hodd among the week's faces.

It's a mid-season episode doing mid-season work, and there's nothing wrong with that. Political rot and foreign operatives, both threatening the same building from different angles, give the hour its shape. It may not be the hour fans quote, but it is the kind of solid week that keeps a series alive between the flashier ones. Dependable work, and dependable is a compliment in this line of business.