Soldiers of Misfortune

The season closes with a private war. Two rival groups of mercenaries are in dispute over a valuable piece of defence equipment, and the dispute has produced a murder and a series of knee-cappings. The squad's problem is not identifying who is doing the damage but establishing why, and stopping it before one side wins. That is a different investigative shape from the season's other stories, which turn on a crime and a culprit rather than a conflict between professionals.

The two factions are led by Shove Christie and Red Keegan, played by Leslie Schofield and John Forgeham, with Christopher Ellison, Tony Scannell and Gary Whelan as the fighters and operators around them. The mercenary material is not exotic: these are British men who have sold their skills and the series places them in the ordinary world of pubs, flats and cars rather than in a foreign field. What makes the case matter is its domestic consequences. Mrs Wragby is billed, which gives the lead of one faction a wife and therefore a home, and Elsie and Jean are also in the cast. The women in the episode are not decoration: they are the people the men's work affects, and the series' willingness to show that is one of the things distinguishing it from a pure action series. Anthony Booth and Morris Perry appear as figures with respectable or institutional positions, which is consistent with the equipment strand, and Dugdale's presence marks the case as one with a national-security dimension.

William Brayne directs, his second episode of this run after the opener. The reference account names the growth in budget, the exclusive use of 16mm film and the employment of directors like Brayne, Roger Tucker and Ben Bolt as the reasons Strangers could on a good day be a serious competitor to The Sweeney, Target and The Professionals, and this is the season's most action-led story and shows that inheritance most directly. The knee-cappings, the two groups of armed men and the set-piece climax are the material a Professionals-trained director handles well, and the reference account records the episode's climax as a hair-raising one, reproducing stills from it in its survey of the series.

The guest cast is drawn from the pool of British actors who specialised in hard men in this period. Forgeham in particular had the build and the presence for this kind of part, and both he and Schofield play the men as competent and dangerous rather than as thugs. Ellison's Wragby is the character with a domestic life attached, and the episode uses that to show what the mercenary trade costs at home.

The honest weakness is that the mercenaries are more interesting than the squad's part in it. The episode's tension sits with the two factions and their reasons, and the regulars' investigation is the means by which the audience is shown that conflict rather than a source of tension in itself. The nature of the defence equipment is not specified in any accessible source, and which side is responsible for the murder and which for the knee-cappings is not stated either.

What it does do is take the intelligence-adjacent material of Series 4 to its furthest point. A murder, mercenaries and a piece of defence equipment in the same case is the fullest expression of the direction the Dugdale character had pushed the programme in, and it gives the season a harder close than the week before it. It introduces no lasting character and establishes no continuing storyline; Series 5 opens the following September with the squad unchanged. Its one continuing element is Dugdale, who returns in Series 5 and passes into the Bulman spin-off, which makes this episode part of the chain carrying the intelligence material out of Strangers and into the character's next series.