Retribution

The episode is the first made under the arrangements that hold for the rest of the run. From Series 3 the whole production moved to 16mm film, after a first series on tape and a second using more film, and the title music was reworked by Mike Moran with synthesiser accompaniment over shots of a cat on the prowl. The programme also moves base and remit: the unit is now the Inter City Squad, London-based, recruited to a national division and commanded by DCS Jack Lambie, with DI Tom Casey alongside him.

The case is arms trafficking, which sets the squad against an organised, armed group rather than the smaller-time criminals of the Manchester years. The method is unchanged: officers who are not known locally working under cover to reach a group ordinary local policing cannot penetrate, now applied to a crime that crosses borders and justifies the national remit. Mark McManus plays Lambie as a dour, direct superior, a deliberate contrast with Rainbow, who had reacted to Bulman's methods with frustration rather than simply directing them. Bulman carries over unchanged in manner, gloves and quotation included, and his rank is not raised. Dennis Blanch's Willis is now a sergeant, which changes the pair's footing on paper and leaves their working partnership as it was. Bruce Bould arrives as DI Tom Casey for this series only.

The reset is clean, and that is its strength: a new base, a new commander and a national remit without discarding the undercover method or the characters the audience already knew. It also gives an early television role to Kevin Whately, billed here as Michael Hobb, some years before Inspector Morse and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

The limitation is that the case itself is thinly documented. How the arms investigation resolves, what becomes of Orlando and Cressida Lacey, and the method by which the squad closes it, are not recorded in any source consulted, and the episode's reputation rests on the format change rather than on a well-remembered plot. The direction is also disputed: the IMDb dataset records two directors, Bill Gilmour and Carol Wilks, while Wikipedia and TheTVDB credit Wilks alone. Two directors on a single episode of this kind is unusual and may reflect a shared credit, a re-shoot or an error, and the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved.

What the episode does establish is the structure the following three series run on. Lambie stays with the programme to its end in 1982 and crosses into the Bulman spin-off, where McManus plays him again. The Inter City Squad's national remit becomes the organising idea for the remaining run, and the wider range of English locations it allows is used deliberately in later episodes. Where the earlier series set Bulman against a single local superior, the new format places him inside a national unit with its own command structure and a broader set of institutional interests, which later stories extend into the Foreign Office and the intelligence services. A retrospective account describes the arrival of Series 3 as the point at which the programme became what it always should have been.