Marriages, Deaths and Births

An arrest goes wrong at a wedding. The unit has moved on a gangland ringleader, Nick Carmos, and Bulman goes in intending to take him during the ceremony, at the one moment when the whole of a criminal family will be gathered and unwilling to allow it. It is a piece of recklessness the series treats as characteristic rather than as an error. The dedication to duty is such that an arrest is attempted when it cannot be made.

The attempt comes apart immediately. Bulman is shot in the shoulder, seriously enough that he is in danger of dying, and then he is taken. Carmos and his friend Frank Revell carry the wounded man away with them, and neither Willis nor Bennett, both present, can do anything but watch. With Bulman gone, the unit's task changes shape from an arrest to a rescue. Det. Sgt. Singer and the team have to find him and get him back alive, and the difficulty is not the finding but the man holding him.

Ben Cross plays Carmos as a genuine psychopath rather than a professional criminal with a temper, and the distinction matters: a professional can be reasoned with and a psychopath cannot. The episode spends most of its length with Bulman in bad shape and in the hands of a man who may kill him at any moment, and it does not soften the ordeal or resolve the wound with a quick recovery. Henderson is given a different job from the rest of the season, playing physical condition and the management of another man's mood rather than investigation, and the series' habit of using him as the eccentric who bounces through a case is suspended. The quality of the hour comes substantially from its willingness to keep him there.

The family is the structure. George Camiller plays Johnny Carmos, Bill Fraser the elder of the clan at whose occasion the arrest was attempted, Tommy Boyle the friend who helps take Bulman and stays with him, and Tony Melody a further member of the Revell side. The wedding is a family occasion and the abduction is made by a friend, which is a more unsettling arrangement than the professional organisations of the season's other episodes. Outside the family there is Willie Mauchlin, played by James Copeland, appearing for the first time, and T. P. McKenna as the Chief Constable to whom the consequences run.

This is the season's bleakest episode and the one that most clearly points at where the series was going. The structure is a rescue solved by nerve rather than deduction, and the judgement that it pointed in the direction the programme would soon move is fair: within a year Strangers would be an Inter City Squad operating nationally, with a picture of an officer shot in Manchester as the event closing its first phase. Charles Sturridge directs, and the retrospective record treats his work here as the season's strongest piece of direction, with one qualification, that it is marred by a pathetically obvious Clockwork Orange reference.

Rainbow makes his last appearance with no designed farewell. David Hargreaves was the series' best foil in the first two series, and his departure, alongside the move to London and the arrival of Mark McManus as DCS Jack Lambie, is one of the two cast changes that define the shift into Series 3.