You'll Be All Right

Jack Stone is a villain with a proposal. He'll give himself up and cooperate fully, on one condition: Cowley guarantees protection for Chrissie, his wife, and the children. It's the kind of offer CI5 doesn't usually get handed. A man like Stone doesn't surrender out of remorse. He does it because the alternative is worse. But the reason for that turns up fast: Stone's son Nick has been run down outside his school in a hit-and-run. Somebody has declared a vendetta against the family, and Stone wants the law on his side before the next attempt lands.

That flips the investigation. The job isn't catching Stone anymore; it's finding out who wants him dead and why, while keeping him and his family alive long enough to matter. The hit-and-run is the message, and the sender is still out there deciding whether to send another. Old rivals surface with grudges to air, and the episode does a fair job of making you wonder which of them has the reach to go after a man's children.

Brian Clemens and Gerry O'Hara wrote it, John Crome directed. Derrick O'Connor plays Stone with the coiled patience of a man who has decided to trust the system for the first time in his life and isn't sure he should; he'd go on to make a memorably smug villain in Lethal Weapon 2. Geraldine Sherman's Chrissie, Melissa Wilks's Linda and Jason Savage's Nick make up the family under siege, with Derek Francis's Len Hatch, Janet Davies's Roz Hatch and Hazel McBride's Liz Spalding circling them.

The title, a promise of reassurance, hangs over the whole hour with a certain irony. Nobody says it to Stone and means it. It's a solid entry, more personal than most, and it earns its tension the old-fashioned way: putting a family in the crossfire and letting the clock run.