Affray

A riot puts a WPC in hospital, and the episode opens in the uncomfortable space after the violence, when the shouting has stopped and the reckoning begins. Affray is a very specific charge, and the title suggests the show's interest is less in the riot itself than in the disorder around its edges: who threw the first punch and how far the trouble spread before anyone could stop it.

With one of their own in hospital, the squad works the aftermath with a particular edge. WPC Evans is the name on the file, and the officers around her, Ashe, Benson, Bryant and the rest, have to piece together accounts from a scene that was chaos ten minutes earlier. The investigation is built out of competing stories, because a riot is a dozen different versions of the same night, all claiming to be the truth. The episode has the sense to show that sorting as slow work rather than a montage. Maggie and the regulars are back at it, methodical where the riot was messy. Nobody in the squad gets to look away from what a riot does to people, because one of their own is the proof of it.

James Doran and Terence Feely wrote it, Christopher Baker directed. Jill Gascoine is Maggie Forbes, with William Marlowe's Russell, Derek Thompson's Fenton, Brian Gwaspari's Croft and Paul Moriarty's Barratt working the case. Jean Hastings plays WPC Evans, Tim Brierley is PC Ashe, Peter Dawson plays PC Benson, Michael Cronin is Sergeant Bryant and James Simmons plays John Douglas.

It's an episode about the mess after the mess, and it doesn't pretend the institution comes out of it looking tidy. But there's something admirable in watching a squad that has just had one of its own hurt get on with the job. That's the discipline, and the episode respects it. It's a sober hour about an institution finding its feet after a bad night, and it doesn't flinch from the seriousness of that.