Finders, Keepers (1)

Series five starts with Maggie coming back to work. That sounds simple, and it is not. The last time she was at Seven Dials, the office was blown up around her and she nearly died, and the show trusts its audience to remember without spelling it out. She has moved house since, but the old address still has her name on it.

The case waiting for her is almost deliberately small: a gang of small-time crooks her colleagues have been tracking. There are no bombs this week, just the patient business of gathering facts on low-level offenders, and the contrast does the episode's work for it. Maggie needs ordinary police work right now, and the script gives it to her. It is the sort of case that would bore most detectives, and exactly what a shaken one needs. The gang is not the point of the episode; the point is that the machine still runs.

William Marlowe and Terence Feely wrote it, Gerry Mill directed, and it went out on 1 September 1984. The familiar faces are all there: Russell, Barratt, Phillips, Mike Turnbull, George Taylor, Auntie Win, Steve, even Eskimo. James Ottaway's George Taylor and Avis Bunnage's Auntie Win keep the home and neighbourhood sides warm. Michael Darby joins as Det. Con. 'Dodger' Coombes, a new name with an old-fashioned nickname. The episode is the first half of a two-parter, ending on the kind of note that makes you glad the next instalment is already booked.

It is a quiet reopening, and the right one. The show does not rush the healing or fake it. And Maggie walks back into the room she nearly died in, picks up a pen, and that is the whole story, told properly. There is a reason the writers chose this moment to bring her back, and the episode honours it.