Dealbreaker

By now, pressure on a chief constable is this show's favourite weather, and Dealbreaker lays it on thick. The handling of a rig hijack draws criticism. So does a new police command vehicle, bought while budgets are being cut. Then a drugs informer dies, and the talk turns to a full investigation into that death. None of these items is a crime. Together they are a weather system. Cade faces the threat head-on, but his team closes ranks, which is the Eastland way. The command vehicle, of all things, is the detail that gets him; a chief constable judged by his car.

Cade looks to Karen Archer's ACC Anne Stewart for help, and together they wait to see whether the Home Office will cut its losses. But the Home Office decides not to act. It would rather keep its maverick chief constable where it can see him than lose him to a scandal and have to deal with whoever comes next. The informer's death gets its own small investigation thread, but the camera stays on the hierarchy.

The cast keeps the county machinery turning: Stuart McGugan's Det. Chief Supt. Sean McCloud, Robert Swann's Edgar Maxwell, T.P. McKenna's Colin Fowler, Michael Cochrane's Nigel Crimmond, Kate Binchy's Councillor Rosalind Maxwell, Juliette Mole's Marie-Pierre Arnoux, David Hunt's David Kendal and Leslie Clack's Jacques Solomes. None of them gets a big scene; the point is the machine, not the parts.

Ray Jenkins and Jeffrey Caine wrote it, A.J. Quinn directed.

The title promises a breaking point that never quite arrives, and that is the point. Cade is too useful to sack, and he knows it. The episode is a study in how institutions protect their own, sometimes by doing nothing at all, and it ends with the quiet click of a decision not to decide. It is the kind of episode that looks like filler until you notice how carefully it has been built.