Call of the Wild

Bulman goes under cover with a gang to gather evidence on a series of robberies. He is present as an accomplice when the gang carries out one of them. He cannot stop it without destroying the cover that is the entire reason he is there, and he cannot be seen to obstruct it, so a police officer takes part in the crime he was sent to gather evidence against. The episode does not pretend otherwise, and it treats his arithmetic about risk rather than a moral crisis as the honest response.

Then the trap closes from the other side. DS David Singer is pursuing the same robberies without knowing where Bulman is or what he is doing. As far as Singer's operation can tell, Bulman is one of the gang. The undercover officer becomes the quarry, hunted by the force he serves, and the assistance he needs is from officers working under cover near him. The resolution depends on the two halves of the operation finding a way to meet.

The point of view is what makes the episode unusual for its period. Most British police series of the late 1970s put the audience with the police; this one puts the audience with a policeman who has temporarily ceased to be recognisable as one. The mystery is not whodunnit but whether the officer will be caught by the wrong side. That is the series' founding premise, that its officers are strangers to a city precisely so they can pass unnoticed, taken to its unpleasant conclusion: an officer who passes unnoticed by criminals also passes unnoticed by police. The episode does not moralise about it.

John Ronane's Singer is the most interesting second performance in the first two series. He is not a fool and not an antagonist; he is a competent detective pursuing the right people, and the irony is that his competence is what puts Bulman in danger. It is the clearest statement of the structural problem at the heart of Unit 23's method. Henderson carries the rest, playing two performances at once, the gang member and the policeman who cannot show that he is one.

Frances Tomelty's final episode gives Doran no designed farewell. The character simply stops appearing. Across the two series she is the most physically capable of the unit's officers and the only one with a background outside English policing, and the departure ends the original three-officer unit and begins the series' long pattern of recasting the female lead, with Bennett arriving two episodes later. Paul Copley and Deirdre Costello are the strongest presences among the guests, and Geoffrey Wilkinson's Cyril Smedley is the figure the published summaries single out as the gang's head.

The honest weakness is the written record. Published summaries stop at the premise, and the detail of the gang, the robbery Bulman is drawn into and the way he is extracted is not documented in any source consulted, so the account here is limited to what the premise and the credited cast establish. The episode itself is the ancestor of a great deal of later television, and it is done without the procedural scaffolding modern series use to explain and excuse the dilemma. It is also one of the episodes the 1980s repeats skipped.