Queen's Pawn

Queen's Pawn starts in a courtroom with a verdict that stinks. Three men have killed someone, and a high-powered lawyer has talked them out of it. Their victim doesn't get a vote. They walk. The families don't get justice and the law takes a black eye. Regan, though, walks out with something he has never been handed before: permission. Because the courts have failed, he is authorised to bring the three in by whatever means necessary. It's a licence to be Regan, issued in triplicate.

And he uses it. The episode is a study in how far that mandate stretches, and how far a man will push it when the paperwork backs him up. Regan and his team step around procedure with a shrug, and the pursuit of the three men turns into a game played at the very edge of what the job will bear. Nobody on the team looks happy about it either, which is what keeps the episode honest. Nobody is comfortable, least of all the men being hunted, who discover that the rules that saved them in court don't apply in a back street.

Ranald Graham and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, Viktors Ritelis directed. John Thaw and Dennis Waterman are Regan and Carter, with Garfield Morgan's Haskins looking on. Tony Selby's Johnny Lyon and Julian Glover's Bernard Stone give the episode its menace, Lynn Dearth is Sheila Lyon, and Morris Perry, John Flanagan, Tony Caunter and Martyn Read complete the line-up. It's a solid, workmanlike cast in a story that needs exactly that.

The clever bit is the title. Three men who thought they were pawns get to find out what the queen is for, and the episode doesn't pretend Regan's methods are pretty. It just asks whether you'd rather have him on your side, and most viewers would take their chances with the back street.