Discovered in a Graveyard

Doyle is shot in his own flat, and for a while it looks like he won't get up. And the bullet puts him in hospital, critically hurt, leaving the rest of the episode running in two directions at once: the hunt for the man who pulled the trigger, and the strange country Doyle visits while he's out cold, where he holds conversations with Cowley in a graveyard that may be more real than they seem. The hospital bed is the still point, and everyone else moves around it.

The shooting wasn't random. Doyle had been digging into a bombing plot, and Cowley's instinct points at a terrorist group whose members were blown up after a CI5 car chase. Two of theirs died. That kind of arithmetic tends to get answered. The question is who gets to do the answering, and how much damage they'll do before the names line up. Cowley and Bodie work the ground outside the hospital walls, reconstructing the last few days one fact at a time. They need a name for the shooter, and they need to be sure there isn't a second visit coming.

Brian Clemens and Christopher Wicking wrote it, Anthony Simmons directed. The coma sequences are the riskiest material the series ever gave Martin Shaw, and he sells them; the graveyard conversations with Gordon Jackson's Cowley are properly odd, which is probably the point. Around the hospital, Philip Latham's Hogan, Richard Moore's Malone, Derek Waring's Dr. Seigel, Steve Alder's Murphy, Vincent Wong's Colonel Lin Foh and Megumi Shimanuki's Mayli Kuolo all have their parts in the reconstruction.

It's a grim hour, and it leans hard on the idea that Doyle may not want to come back. The show rarely let its heroes bleed like this. That's what gives the final act its weight: the man in the coma has to choose, and everyone else has to keep working while he does.