The Thunder and the Lightning

A child on a beach is poisoned by oil from a tanker, and Elizabeth Stafford is the doctor who has to treat her. At the same time, her husband is ordered to evict environmental protesters from a ship that is, legally at least, carrying toxic waste. The Staffords end up on opposite sides of the same argument, and the episode lets that sit without reaching for a tidy answer. Both crises land on the same day, because that is how the show likes its weeks.

The oil spill is an accident; the protest is a choice. John's job is to enforce a law he may not love, and the show is interested in that gap. The ship is carrying the waste legally, which is the part that makes the protesters' point for them. It helps that the hour gives Elizabeth real work to do rather than turning her into a plot device, which has not always been guaranteed in this series.

Jeffrey Caine and Peter Palliser wrote it, Desmond Davis directed. Tim Pigott-Smith's Stafford does the enforcing with Karen Archer's Anne Stewart and Eamon Boland's Jim Gray around him, while Judy Loe's Elizabeth gets the quieter, harder scenes. Jeremy Clyde's Sir Anthony Maylor and Gary Waldhorn's Cllr. Alec Radcliffe carry the official weather, with Michael Cochrane's Nigel Crimmond, T.P. McKenna's Colin Fowler, Owen John O'Mahoney's Mark Jenkins and Edward Clayton's Chief Supt. King filling out the hour.

It is not the show's most electric episode, and it does not need to be. The thunder and the lightning are both present, in the argument and in the family that has to live through it. But the best moments are the small ones: a doctor at a hospital bed, and a man doing a job he would rather not be doing. It is an hour about duty colliding with conscience, and the collision happens at the dinner table as much as on the beach.