A Much Underestimated Man

The final series opens with Bulman in an unlikely setting. He is taking saxophone lessons from a jazz musician, Sonny Boy Saltz, and the instrument is in his hands when a shot is fired at him. The bullet is stopped by the saxophone, saving his life, and Saltz is heard playing the main-title theme of The Sweeney on it, an in-joke for viewers of the era's police shows. Bulman then privately admits to Willis that the shooting frightened him badly, which is a rare admission of fear from a character who has spent five series presenting himself as unflappable.

The squad's task is protective and predictive rather than reactive: they are assigned to tail an experienced hitman and work out who his next target is, without alerting the target or causing a panic. The tension is managerial as much as criminal, because if the hitman slips the tail and kills, responsibility will fall on the squad, and Lambie makes plain that the can will be carried by Bulman. The trail runs through a network of contacts, Brian Miller's Denzil, Edward Peel's Ewan Walters and Constantine Gregory's Henri Gebhardt among them, with Paul McDowell as a fellow officer and Pamela Salem among the police figures drawn in. The squad reaches the target in time and the attack is prevented, and Bulman's own close call remains the emotional centre of the hour rather than the procedural outcome.

Lol Coxhill, a genuine free-jazz saxophonist, is cast as Saltz and credited with the episode's incidental music as well as appearing on screen, so the saxophone that saves Bulman's life is played by the musician who scored the episode. That gives the hour a sound no studio musician would supply. Ken Grieve directs; the mediagems guide records that Grieve was the figure who changed Bulman from the violent rule-bender of The XYY Man into the quirky, glove-wearing figure of Strangers, so his return to direct the opening episode of the final series has a neat symmetry, though the guide does not claim that as an intent.

Henderson's playing of Bulman's fear is the episode's centre. The show had always allowed eccentricity, the gloves, the inhaler, the plastic carrier bag and the Shakespeare quotations, and here the mannerisms sit alongside plain fright, which is a different note from the comic manner the character usually adopts. Blanch's Willis carries the procedural load, asking the questions that force Bulman to say out loud what he feels, and McManus's Lambie is used for the threat of institutional blame rather than for a chase, which keeps the tension inside the squad.

The structure is inverted, and that is the episode's real distinction. Instead of a crime to be solved after the fact, the squad is given a future crime to prevent, so the dramatic question is whether surveillance can work before there is a body. That makes it a story about competence under pressure and about the cost of failure, and it is why the admission of fear matters: the series' usual method is impersonation and improvisation, and here the method is patience and nerve. The procedural spine, tailing a hitman and finding the target, is thin, and much of the running time depends on the strength of Henderson's performance rather than on a complex investigation. What it does establish is the season's pattern of Bulman-weighted stories and the programme's willingness to put the lead's mortality on the table at the start of the run that will end with his retirement.