Jack and Jill

The hospital siege rolls on, and Stafford is still in the middle of the negotiating, but the episode is careful to point out that the building is not the only place where the pressure is being felt. A female officer resigns over sexual harassment, and the department has to absorb that quietly, without much ceremony. The resignation is reported almost in passing, and that quietness is the point; the force would rather move on. Anne Stewart, meanwhile, comes home to find that her husband Martin has walked out on her.

The episode is at its best when it lets those strands bleed into one another. Stafford talks to the gunman and talks to his own people, and the two conversations start to sound alike: people who feel unheard, making a point with the only language they have. It is not a comfortable comparison, and the show does not labour it. Anne's empty house is the episode's strongest image, and Karen Archer sells it without raising her voice. The siege keeps the clock running; the other two stories keep the hour honest.

Jeffrey Caine and Brian Clark wrote it, Desmond Davis directed. Tim Pigott-Smith carries the siege with the patience the role demands, while Karen Archer's Anne gets the quieter, harder scenes. Roger Lloyd Pack's Kenneth Rudyard and Ricky McDonagh's Gary Leonard keep the standoff ticking, with Judy Loe's Dr Elizabeth Stafford, Eamon Boland's Jim Gray, Tony Caunter's Arthur Quine, T.P. McKenna's Colin Fowler, David Cardy's Martin Stewart and Geoffrey Bateman's Commissaire Toulin filling the edges.

The title promises a nursery rhyme, and the episode delivers a siege and a marriage ending in the same week. The rhyme promises a tumble down a hill; the hour delivers something closer to a long fall, watched in slow motion. But then, the show has always trusted its audience to notice that kind of thing. It is a heavy episode that never raises its voice, which is a harder trick than it looks.