Episode 3

A British plane is thought to have been hijacked and flown to an American airstrip. When the team shows up looking for answers, the rescue attempt goes badly wrong, and Ros Myers is captured by the Yalta organisation. From there the episode stops being about the aircraft entirely and becomes about the cover-up the aircraft was meant to hide.

Ros's captivity is the real story. Her captors put her through mental torture, working on her mind instead of her body, and they feed her pieces of news about Zaf that she would rather not hear. While she is in their hands, the rest of the team digs into a suspicious plane crash near an American airbase in the UK and finds a trail that leads to something called Copenhagen, and to an international conspiracy that gets bigger the closer they look.

The two threads run in parallel, and the episode trusts the audience to feel the distance between them. A room with one woman in it is scarier than any airstrip.

David Wolstencroft wrote it, Charles Beeson directed. Peter Firth's Harry Pearce works the political fallout with Rupert Penry-Jones's Adam Carter, while Hermione Norris carries the hour as Ros Myers. Miranda Raison's Jo Portman, Gemma Jones's Connie James, Hugh Simon's Malcolm Wynn-Jones, Matthew Marsh's Bob Hogan, Agni Scott's Ana Bakhshi and Simon Abkarian's Dariush Bakhshi complete the team, with William Bateman as the air traffic controller.

The conspiracy is the frame, and the interrogation is the point of it. Norris makes the captivity quietly horrible, and the episode is careful to show the cost of it without turning her into a victim for the audience to pity. There is a particular cruelty in the way the hour withholds Zaf's fate from her while giving it to us. The team keeps chasing a cover-up. And Ros sits in the middle of it, paying for everyone else's mistakes.