Bounty Hunter

A Glaswegian gunfighter rides into Limehouse, blood is shed in the streets, and Doc Halliday's fantasies explode in other people's faces. The fifth episode of the second series is the run's most eccentric premise, and it is one of the two written by someone other than the show's creator.

Maurice Roëves plays Doc Halliday, a name borrowed from the American frontier and attached to a Scottish criminal performing it in an East End district. The summary's phrase about fantasies exploding in other people's faces is the only judgement any source passes on him, and it is the least playful sentence in the 1982 synopses. What happens to Halliday, who is shot and why, is not recorded anywhere, and it is not inferred here.

The supporting cast is a roll-call of the period's character actors in small parts: Michael Attwell as Harry Foss, John Horsley as Dr Green, Tony Calvert as Menace, Stevan Rimkus as Brush, Arnold Yarrow as an old man and Martin Gower as a barman. IMDb adds Heather Page as Ms Bennett, Bill Leadbitter as Toerag, David Bannerman as Prof. and Reggie Ranjhe as Mr Ram, none of whom appears in Wikipedia's list.

Edward Boyd wrote this episode and Pasts, the only two of the fourteen not written by Ian Kennedy Martin. He was a Scottish television and radio writer, and a Glasgow villain with a borrowed American name is a subject that suits him exactly: the character's city and the writer's are the same one. It is the run's clearest case of an outside voice producing a different kind of episode.

Laurence Moody directed his only episode of the run, and Chris Wimble edited, one of the few episodes not cut by Bill Wright. Those two variations give the hour a slightly different feel from the surrounding weeks, which suits a story built on an imported fiction.

The theme is borrowed identity. A Scottish criminal imitating an American gunfighter in a Chinese district is a story about people wearing other people's myths, and the series' own lead has spent two years being told he does not belong in the place he was born. None of that is stated in any source; it is what the premise is doing.

Method is the run's conventional police work, with Ho arriving after the blood rather than before it, and the tone is darker than the second series' average. Yip's Ho is placed as the representative of the real against a man performing a story from another country, which is the series' own subject in a new costume.

IMDb records 8.0 from 6 votes, the second-highest figure of the fourteen behind Tapdancer. Six votes cannot establish a reputation and the number is recorded without being leaned on.

What can be said is that no other British police series of 1982 was making an hour in which the villain is pretending to be Doc Holliday, and that the episode commits to the idea rather than playing it as a gag.