The Right Wing

A group of neo-Nazis plans to raid the home of a local councillor, and Eastland finds out what domestic extremism looks like when it stops being a headline and becomes a job. The episode tracks the investigation with the show's usual care: who is behind it, how much warning there is, whether anyone will act in time. It is the kind of plot that could easily tip into melodrama, and the show resists it at every turn. The target is a local councillor's front door, which is the whole point of the threat. The show has always been strongest when the enemy is familiar.

Stuart McGugan's Det. Chief Supt. Sean McCloud does most of the legwork. David Bamber's Philip Garrick and Maureen Beattie's Gemma Marshall are in the mix, Alan MacNaughtan's Prof. Geoffrey Jennings-Wilson gives the operation a respectable face, and Dermot Crowley's Asst. Chief Constable David Bannen keeps the hierarchy twitchy. Louisa Milwood-Haigh's Elena Belinsky, Colin Hurley's Ray Murray, Steven Mackintosh's Dean Mills and Peter-Hugo Daly's Det. Sgt. Kevin Lansing fill out the world. Each of them gets just enough screen time to matter, which is a discipline the series never lost. For a force used to drunks and burglaries, a planned political raid is a different order of problem.

Jeffrey Caine and Peter Jukes wrote it, A.J. Quinn directed. The credits list a dozen names, and the cast list is half the pleasure of watching.

But the most unsettling thing is how ordinary the planning looks. A house to be hit and a councillor to be frightened, with not a swastika in sight. The show knows the banality is the point, and it makes the raid feel like a missed delivery more than a battle. It is a quiet episode about a loud ideology, and the restraint is the right call. The raid, when it comes, is handled as business rather than spectacle. The episode asks how you guard against a threat that looks like nothing in particular, and it declines to give an easy answer.