First Principles

"First Principles" opens with a favour nobody wants to ask. Neil Burnside, who runs operations for the SIS, is approached by the head of the Norwegian secret service: a spy plane has gone down inside Russia and its crew need bringing out. Burnside is dead against it, and you can see his point. The men he would be committing are his best, a unit of three agents who handle the jobs that officially never happen.

The Foreign Office does not share his reservations. It has interests of its own, so the operation is ordered over his head, and there is real pleasure in watching a man who runs his department like a fortress get overruled by people who have never been closer to danger than a committee room. Then the ground shifts. The Norwegians are playing their own game, and the agents end up caught between the Russians hunting them and allies who will not tell them the truth. Loyalty, in this world, is a negotiable asset.

Torvik, the Norwegian chief, makes his request sound almost reasonable. That is precisely what makes it suspicious, and the script is clever enough to let the audience see the trap long before Burnside's men do. The mission itself stays mostly off screen, which is the right call for an opening episode. Better to establish who these people are and how they wound each other before any blood gets spilled.

Ian MacKintosh wrote it, Michael Ferguson directed. Roy Marsden anchors the piece as Burnside, with Richard Vernon's 'C', Ray Lonnen's Willie Caine, Alan MacNaughtan's Sir Geoffrey Wellingham and Jerome Willis's Matthew Peele around him. Bob Sherman plays Jeff Ross, Elizabeth Bennett Diane Lawler, Olaf Pooley Lars Torvik, David Glyder Jake Landy and Barkley Johnson Brian.

What the episode gets right is showing the machinery before the action: the phone calls, the objections, the decision taken somewhere above Burnside's head. The grim message, delivered without fuss, is that the most dangerous people in the room may be the ones you are there to help. And Burnside knows it before anyone else does; the knowledge is already costing him.