At All Costs

"At All Costs" opens the second season with a Sandbagger in trouble and the clock running. Tom Elliot, Sandbagger Two, has gone to Sofia to meet a Bulgarian agent who claims to have information worth passing to the West. The meeting goes wrong, as these meetings do, and Elliot ends up in the hands of people whose hospitality does not run to conversation. The agent's information may be worth having or may be a lure; the episode is in no hurry to say.

Burnside and Caine go in to try to get him out. But the head of the Bulgarian Secret Service asks to meet Elliot personally, and Burnside does not like it one bit. He intends to give Elliot backup whether his superiors approve or not. That stubbornness is pure Burnside, the quality that makes him impossible to stop and exhausting to work for. His superiors will hear about it later, and the row will be loud; for now, the rescue is all that matters.

The hour is a straight rescue story, run clean. Long odds, and a man making decisions on the move because nobody at a desk will make them faster. The Bulgarian intelligence community on display is a shifting, hostile place, and nobody in it can be taken at face value, which keeps the rescue honest.

Ian MacKintosh wrote it, Michael Ferguson directed. Roy Marsden anchors it as Burnside, with Ray Lonnen's Willie Caine, David Beames's Tom Elliot, Richard Vernon's 'C' and Alan MacNaughtan's Sir Geoffrey Wellingham around him. Michael Cashman plays Mike Wallace, Jerome Willis Matthew Peele, Bob Sherman Jeff Ross, Jana Shelden Karen Milner and Peter Laird Edward Tyler.

The title is the promise. Whatever it takes, Burnside is ready to pay it. It is a strong return to form. The danger feels real, and the rescue is earned the hard way. Burnside's refusal to ask permission may be the most British thing on television all year.