Deep Breath

A brick from a motorway bridge ends a police officer's life, and the episode starts there, with no softening. Two youths did it, and whatever they meant by it, Stafford now has a dead officer on his books and a housing estate that is about to boil over. The ingredients are simple, and the damage is permanent. A patrol car under a bridge is not where anyone expects to lose a colleague.

But the unrest comes quickly, as it always does, and the force has to hold a line between mourning its own and policing the estate without setting it off again. It is the sort of week where every decision is wrong until it works, and the show keeps that tension honest. The investigation matters, but the hour is mostly about the estate, and the episode sits with that coldly. The estate knows its own anger better than the force does, and the episode respects that. The episode keeps the estate's anger in frame without letting it become the villain.

Peter Palliser and Jeffrey Caine wrote it, Desmond Davis directed. Tim Pigott-Smith's Stafford works the aftermath with Karen Archer's Anne Stewart and Tony Caunter's Arthur Quine, while Judy Loe's Dr Elizabeth Stafford and Ross Livingstone's Tim Stafford keep the home side present. T.P. McKenna's Colin Fowler and Gary Waldhorn's Cllr. Alec Radcliffe carry the political weather, with Peter Jonfield's Chief Supt. Andy Ward, Gillian Martell's Diane Lewis and Andrew Baker's Nick Thomas on the ground where the trouble is.

The episode takes a deep breath, as its title suggests, and then gets on with it. There is no tidy answer at the end, just the slow work of a force trying to keep a community from breaking. That feels closer to the truth than most dramas dare. The show does not solve the estate in an hour, and it would be lying if it tried.