Walking On Water (2)

The second part of Walking On Water keeps Chappel and Hutchins inside The Jupiter, still working the gambling and prostitution ring they started on last week. The shape of the job is clear now: Chappel means to bring the whole organisation down, not just the faces at the door. That ambition has a cost, and this time it lands on P.C. Dougie Raymond, who is pushed to the brink by the pressure of it. Raymond has been teetering for most of the series, and this operation is the thing that finally tips him.

And Joe Robinson finds his own trouble. He gets into hot water with one of the club's working girls, the sort of entanglement that blurs the line the squad is supposed to hold. It is a neat piece of writing, because it shows the vice reaching past the operation and into the officers themselves. Nobody on the team stays quite clean. Robinson's slip is the smaller of the two, but it colours the whole investigation.

J.C. Wilsher wrote it and Matthew Evans directed. Ken Stott is Chappel, driven as ever, with Caroline Catz's Hutchins at his shoulder. David Harewood's Robinson, Diane Parish's Shirley Robinson and Marc Warren's Raymond fill out the squad, while the club is populated by Tim Woodward's Trevor Nashe, Melanie Gutteridge's Donna, Murray Head's Tommy Roker, Robbie Gee's Maxwell, and Niven Boyd's Slater.

The episode works best as a study in strain. The Vice often lets its cases spread into the private lives of the people running them, and here that spillage is the point. Chappel pushes hardest precisely because he cannot see the damage he is doing to his own people. I thought Raymond's breaking was the most honest beat, a reminder that the squad's own weaknesses are part of the battlefield. It is a solid, grim little chapter.