Forger's Gamble

The title promises a forger and a gamble, and the episode delivers only the second. Cade announces a radical plan: decriminalise certain drugs for an experimental trial, the sort of proposal that sounds reasonable in a report and explosive in a headline. The force's reaction is immediate, and it is not friendly. It is the sort of announcement that gets a chief constable a lot of phone calls before lunch. Even the word 'trial' carries double weight.

The hour is about the fallout rather than the policy. Donald Sumpter's Chief Superintendent Derek Gillman is one of the loudest voices against the plan, while Stuart McGugan's A.C.C. (Ops) Sean McCloud and Vivienne Ritchie's Chief Supt. Jane Curzon work the operational side. Gillman's opposition is the most interesting thing about him, and Sumpter plays it without shouting. John Kane's John Bavistock, Geoffrey Larder's Sgt. David Cox, Vincent Brimble's Det. Insp. Charlie Thornton and Richard Huw's Det. Sgt. Steven MacGuire keep the station moving, and Charlie Creed-Miles's Chas Sewell is a reminder of how young the junior ranks could look, and how much menace they could carry. Ingrid Lacey's Alison Dell has her own thoughts, presumably written down somewhere. The trial itself stays off-screen; what matters is the argument around the table.

Jeffrey Caine and Michael Russell wrote it, A.J. Quinn directed.

And the show sides with no one entirely. The decriminalisation plan is never made to look obviously right or obviously wrong; it is simply a thing a chief constable tried, and the machine pushed back. For a drama about top brass, that neutrality is a small act of honesty, and the controversy fills the hour without ever becoming a lecture. Cade comes out of it diminished but still standing, which is about as good as this job gets. The title, Forger's Gamble, never quite matches the story on screen, and the mismatch is part of the fun. It is a quiet controversy by design, the kind that simmers rather than boils.