Blade

A young man is found stabbed to death on the London Underground one morning, and the circumstances point the inquiry towards a homosexual encounter. The body turns up with the morning commuters, and the station isn't ready for what the case implies. It's 1980, and the show doesn't pretend that's a neutral fact. Maggie takes the case where the evidence leads. Her colleague DI Croft doesn't, and the resulting row between them is the real subject of the episode.

Brian Gwaspari's Croft is allowed to be wrong in a way that feels lived-in rather than villainous, which makes the clash sharper. Gascoine's Maggie, by contrast, is all brisk refusal to look away from what's in front of her. But the station tension gets more screen time than the mystery itself, and that's the right call: the victim is dead, while the attitudes around his death are still walking around. The row happens where the squad can hear it, which is the point. The audience is being asked to take sides, and the episode is careful whose side it wants.

The Thornes hover at the edge of the case, Kenneth Gilbert's doctor and Patricia Garwood's wife both carrying secrets that surface at their own pace. Brian McDermott's Mr Richardson, John Serret's Hugo and Charmian May's Mrs Ridgeway complete the circle of people with opinions about the dead man's life. Nigel Rathbone's Steven Forbes appears too, a reminder that Maggie's home and work lives keep bumping into each other. The victim's life gets pieced together from people who would rather not talk about it, and the reluctance tells its own story.

Roger Marshall and Terence Feely wrote it, Christopher Hodson directed.

The episode is more interesting than its case, and it knows it. The stabbing gets solved; the bigger question, about what a police force thinks of the people it's meant to protect, gets left open. Decades on, that's the bit that still stings.