Episode 3

A secret meeting of tycoons is stormed by armed men, and eight of the world's richest people become hostages in a room they were told was secure. The obvious read is a kidnapping, but the situation stops behaving like one almost immediately. And the reason it stops is Ros: she is undercover in that room, one of the hostages herself, which turns every decision the team makes into a calculation about whether they are saving her or walking her into worse.

The episode keeps the pressure on the people outside as much as the people inside. Lucas and the rest work the stronghold from every angle while events within it spiral, and the writing makes it feel plausible that nobody walks out of this one. There is a museum curator on the cast list, which is the sort of detail that says the story is not quite what it looks like, and there is a stretch of the hour where survival looks impossible.

Sean Reilly, Christian Spurrier and David Wolstencroft wrote it, and Sam Miller directed. Richard Armitage's Lucas leads the response, with Peter Firth's Harry Pearce and Robert Glenister's Home Secretary managing the politics above him. Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Rod Culbertson are the Gevitskys, Pascal Langdale is Finn Lambert, Thomas Lockyer is Sir Robin Ashenden, Justin Avoth is Rudy, and Victoria Bye is the Museum Curator.

The hostage thriller works best when the room feels like the end of the world, and this one does. Ros being one of the taken sharpens every shot. The episode keeps the teaser question, whether this is the end of the road for Ros, unanswered for as long as it dares. It is the kind of hour that leaves you checking the clock, mostly to see how much time the team has left to get it right.