Special Relationship

"Special Relationship" closes the first season with Burnside's worst week. An East German spy working for the SIS comes up with photographs of a new missile site, and the only agent properly qualified to go into East Berlin after them is Laura Dickens. Everyone can see it, and so can Burnside, who is in love with her by now and who has spent the last few weeks learning how badly he wants her out of danger. The reluctance is real, and so is the reason for it; the episode does not pretend the conflict is abstract.

He sends her anyway, because the job is the job, and she is captured by the East German security service. What follows is the sort of bargain that gives the show its reputation. He promises the French secret service access to CIA materials in exchange for a high-ranking KGB agent, who can then be swapped for Laura. The deal works, after a fashion. And it costs him in ways the episode is smart enough to leave half unsaid.

The ending is the point. Burnside arrives at a solution that pleases no one, least of all himself, and the camera lets him sit with it. Laura gets out. The cost of getting her out keeps climbing, and the episode has the nerve to show the bill. No triumphant walk into the sunset here. A man has betrayed one set of allies to save the woman he loves, and the invoice will be arriving for years.

Ian MacKintosh wrote it, Michael Ferguson directed. Roy Marsden anchors it as Burnside, with Richard Vernon's 'C', Ray Lonnen's Willie Caine, Alan MacNaughtan's Sir Geoffrey Wellingham and Diane Keen's Laura Dickens around him. Elizabeth Bennett plays Diane Lawler, Jerome Willis Matthew Peele, Bob Sherman Jeff Ross, Alan Downer Baumel and Barkley Johnson Brian.

It is the strongest of the first seven, because it lets the personal and the professional collide at last and refuses to pretend that either one wins.