Armed and Dangerous

The episode opens with routine police work that goes badly wrong. Bulman and Willis are given an escort job, bringing a suspect to London for questioning, and they are ambushed at a roadside cafe. An informer is killed and two Inter City detectives are murdered in the course of it. The opening gunbattle is described by the series' episode guide as excellently staged, and the episode as a whole as a bleak, unpleasant, state-of-the-art piece in which the two officers are pitted against a violent mob.

The case turns on keeping the prisoner, John Rutter, alive and silent. His partner will go to any lengths to ensure his silence, so the shooting is not a random attack on a police escort but an attempt by Rutter's associates to prevent him talking. Bulman and Willis are then working both to hold the case together and to survive the attempts on the prisoner and on themselves. Maurice Colbourne plays Rutter, with Rachel Davies as Jean Rutter, Ken Kitson as Joe Green and Drew Dawson as Tommy Quince, and the episode's own credit block adds Jonathan Davis as Doug Smithers, a surgeon and a CID man among the aftermath, and Meg Johnson as a woman in the suburbs. The surgeon and the CID man point to a hospital sequence and a police aftermath to the shooting.

This is part one of a two-part story and it does not resolve. It continues the following week in A Racing Certainty, in which the squad works under cover to find the person responsible for killing one of their own at a racetrack, and Colbourne, Davies and Doug Smithers appear again. The pair is treated here as a genuine two-part story on the strength of the episode guide's statement that it is one of the two the series made and the shared guest cast, though the record is contested: TheTVDB carries no Part label on either and summarises the second as a self-contained race-rigging case. The caveat is that no DVD sleeve or on-screen billing was read to confirm how the two were billed to viewers.

The method is not the series' usual undercover work. The squad is on an escort and is attacked, so the story runs as a pursuit and a protection problem rather than an infiltration, and the killing of officers gives it a harder tone than most of the run. That is the point of the format experiment: a two-parter allows a bigger and more sustained story than a single hour. The unit's usual political and intelligence strands are absent, the enemy being an organised criminal group willing to shoot police to keep a prisoner quiet.

William Brayne directs and makes excellent use of English countryside locations, as the episode guide notes he had in his episode of The Professionals titled Blackout. At least part of the case was filmed in Scarborough, recorded by the town's own local history blog. Brayne had just finished his last series of The Professionals, and that kind of directing hire is counted among the reasons the third series could compete with The Sweeney, Target and The Professionals on a good day.

The episode is also the last appearance of Bruce Bould as DI Tom Casey, a Series 3 character only, and his departure leaves the squad as it would be for the rest of the run: Bulman, Willis, Bennett and Singer under Lambie. As a single hour it is incomplete by design, and the sources describe the setup far more fully than the content, but the staged violence of the opening and the discipline of not resolving early are its real achievements.