A Feasible Solution

"A Feasible Solution" splits its attention between two romances, and both are bad ideas. At home, Burnside is wooing Laura Dickens, and it is a strange sight: the man who runs his department like a fortress, doing the gentle work of courtship and looking entirely unprepared for it. Part of the pleasure is watching someone who spends his days on covert operations try to remember how to behave on a date. Abroad, Willie Caine is in Cyprus, trying to recover a British engineer and track down missing rocket scientists, and he falls for the attractive KGB agent who has been planted on him.

The two strands are the same story told twice. Both men are lowering their guard, and the show knows what happens to people who do that; the audience is invited to watch and wince. The Cypriot operation has a cold edge to it. The woman is charming and professional, and she is working Caine from the first handshake. The engineer and the scientists are, in the end, the excuse; the real operation is the one being run on Caine himself.

It is a rare episode with no gunfire to speak of, and the tension is none the worse for it. But the romantic stakes replace the bullets, and they turn out to be just as dangerous.

Ian MacKintosh wrote it, Michael Ferguson directed. Roy Marsden anchors it as Burnside, with Richard Vernon's 'C', Ray Lonnen's Willie Caine and Diane Keen's Laura Dickens around him. Bob Sherman plays Jeff Ross, Sarah Bullen Jill Ferris, Jerome Willis Matthew Peele, Elizabeth Bennett Diane Lawler, Kenneth Watson Hugh Douglas and Richard Cornish Philip Jeremiah.

The title promises a feasible solution, and the episode delivers one. Burnside and Caine both get what they asked for, which is the show's idea of a happy ending. It is not heroic. It is the sort of answer real professionals would accept, which is rarer on television than it should be.