Black Fox, White Vixen

Protection duty sounds like a rest cure. In practice it's mostly waiting, and for Maggie Forbes it's waiting with a famous actress who keeps getting death threats. Marcia Bancroft is the star of a long-running series, and the threats are real enough that the squad is assigned to keep her alive. The episode's title, with its foxes and vixens, hints at where the danger actually sits: close to home, in the company the actress keeps. Fame is the reason she is a target, and the same fame makes guarding her harder.

Trouble springs from an unexpected quarter, and the show plays fair with the mystery, letting the threat feel external for exactly as long as it can. The team rotates around Marcia, watching the public appearances and reading the letters, all the while testing the patience of the people closest to her. The job of keeping an actress alive means living inside her schedule: the studios and the entrances, the faces who know her routines better than the police do. Keith Bristowe, Brian and Pam Spencer, and the quietly observant Helen Croft all move through the episode, and the writing keeps you guessing about which of them means her harm. Elizabeth Counsell plays Marcia with the brittle charm of a woman used to smiling for cameras.

Jeremy Burnham and Terence Feely wrote it, Nic Phillips directed. Jill Gascoine is Maggie Forbes, William Marlowe is Russell, Derek Thompson plays Fenton and Brian Gwaspari is Croft. Nigel Rathbone plays Steve Forbes, Martin Jacobs is Keith Bristowe, Ronald Hines plays Brian Spencer, Helen Bourne is Pam Spencer and Katherine Stark plays Helen Croft.

It's a brisk, talky episode, and the talk is the point: threats arrive in envelopes, but motive arrives in conversation. And the show's best trick is letting the protection detail feel like real work, full of boring hours and one very bad one. The episode's best moments are the quiet ones, waiting in corridors while the actress works.