The Resolution

By the time The Resolution opens, Spider Scott has stopped being anyone's quiet asset. Two South African hitmen have worked him over for the negative he lifted from the Chinese, and the bruising is still fresh when he decides to change the rules. Instead of handing the photograph to Fairfax, he offers it to Li Tshien, and there's a certain cold nerve in the way he does it. Selling stolen goods to the other side is the oldest burglar's trick in the book; the new part is doing it with your life on the table.

He gets out of that first scrape more by luck than by plan, and the episode's real work then begins: making him understand the danger hasn't gone anywhere. It has simply changed address. Fairfax wants the picture. Li Tshien wants the picture. The South Africans want the negative back, and the bruises they left behind are not a debt anyone plans to settle. Everyone at the table is playing their own game, and Spider is the one card they all want.

Ivor Marshall and Kenneth Royce wrote it, Ken Grieve directed, and the regulars are all present: Stephen Yardley's Spider, Don Henderson's Bulman, Leslie Schofield's Bluey Palmer, Alan Rowe's Cummings, Mark Dignam's Fairfax, Vivienne McKee's Maggie Parsons and Paul Freeman's Ray Lynch. Don Warrington turns up as Jomo Ibbon, Gerry Cowan as Simmonds, and Ric Young plays Li Tshien with the stillness of a man who has already decided how the bidding ends.

The Resolution closes out the first series with everyone's motives laid out and no one's hands clean. It's quieter than the burglaries that came before, more about pressure than climbing. And it earns its title the hard way. Spider walks away knowing exactly what he's worth to the men who use him, and it isn't the kind of knowledge you frame and hang on the wall.