Strained Relations

The acquittal of a child murderer is the sort of outcome that makes the police want to break things, and the Crown Prosecution Service is the nearest target. Strained Relations is exactly what the title says: an hour of the force and the CPS circling each other after a verdict neither side can undo. The case itself is mostly over before the hour starts; what remains is the wreckage of trust. The child murderer himself is never glamorised, which is a mercy.

Cade has to hold the line between the two, and the episode is smart enough not to take sides too loudly. T.P. McKenna's Colin Fowler and Maureen Beattie's Gemma Marshall carry the prosecutorial end; Stuart McGugan's Det. Chief Supt. Sean McCloud and John McArdle's Det. Con. Dave Corbyn carry the police end. Nicholas Woodeson's Milverton, Nickolas Grace's Sir Oliver Creighton, Chris Hargreaves's Ian Dudgeon, Kate McLoughlin's Lisa Dudgeon and Maryann Turner's Mrs O'Callaghan move around them. Cade's own position is the unenviable middle, answerable to the public and the force, and to a law he cannot rewrite. The series has always been interested in how professionals behave when the rules let them down, and this is one of its purest versions of that. The Dudgeons appear here as well as in the previous episode, and the repetition gives the county a sense of continuity.

Jeffrey Caine and Peter Jukes wrote it, A.J. Quinn directed.

But the real subject is how the same facts look from two sides of a courtroom. The episode is quieter than most, with no bombs and no gunfights, and it trusts the tension to hold. It does. The arguments about evidence, about the decision to charge and the decision to prosecute, are the drama, and they are enough. Both sides are right, and both sides are wrong, which is the point. Martin Shaw's Cade spends much of the hour listening, and listening is a skill most dramas forget to show. It is the sort of episode that rewards patience, and it rewards it generously. This is police drama as civic debate, and it is quietly gripping. The episode ends where it began, with the tension still in the air.