Help

Having thought better of her resignation, Maggie goes back to work, and the first thing the job hands her is a friend in trouble. Susan Scott's problems, and her daughter Linda's, are the sort of thing Maggie takes on personally. But there's trouble closer to home, and it's the kind that doesn't come with a case number. Her son Steven has started drinking, and he's doing it in the wake of his father's murder.

The episode runs the two strands side by side, and neither feels like padding. Roger Marshall and Terence Feely keep the domestic story at the front, which is a brave call for a crime series. The murder investigation recedes into background noise; what matters is what grief does to a teenage boy when the adults are all busy. There's no big speech about grief anywhere in the hour; Steven's pain comes out sideways, and the episode trusts that to be enough.

Beth Harris plays Susan Scott with the hollowed-out politeness of someone keeping up appearances, and Kate Dorning's Linda gives her mother plenty to keep appearances up for. Nigel Rathbone's Steven is sullen in the way only a bereaved adolescent can manage, all slammed doors and short answers. Around them, Davyd Harries turns up as Mr Miller, with Stuart Barren's club manager, Jean Warren's Rosie and Peter Spraggon's Station Officer filling out the edges. David Askey directed.

It's a quiet episode, and deliberately so. The title says it all: everyone in it needs help, and almost everyone is too proud or too frightened to ask for it. The show trusts the viewer to notice that Maggie is doing for Susan Scott exactly what she cannot do for her own son. That's the episode, really — one long, patient look at the difference between helping and being helped.