Fall Girl

Bodie's old flame Marikka Schuman, an East German film star, turns up in London, and Bodie is delighted. The reunion is everything he hoped: time together, his flat, the easy comfort of people who once knew each other well. It is also, as the audience suspects long before he does, a setup. Marikka's husband Willis and his henchman have arranged for Bodie to take the blame for an assassination, and the frame is so good that even CI5 starts believing it. He is not a man who falls for the same trick twice, which makes the betrayal land harder.

The episode's twist on the usual run-from-the-law story is that Bodie is running from his own people. His colleagues are hunting him with the same skill they would bring to any other suspect, and there is a particular bleakness in watching men who trained together close in on one of their own. The chase scenes double as a tour of Bodie's own city, every corner of it suddenly hostile. He is eventually cleared, of course, but the episode refuses the tidy ending. There is no reconciliation with Marikka, and the last scenes leave Bodie older about the whole business.

Brian Clemens and Ranald Graham wrote it, and William Brayne directed. Pamela Salem is Marikka, and she makes the betrayal feel like a weight rather than a melodrama, with Michael Latimer as Willis, Frederick Jaeger as Schuman, Sandor Elès as Kreiber and Patrick Malahide among the security men. Malahide would go on to become one of the most reliable character actors of his generation.

It is a personal episode in a series that usually keeps things strictly operational. Bodie gets his name cleared, and it costs him something all the same, in ways the file will never record. That is the point, and the show trusts you to see it.