Law and Order

Spider goes back inside in this one, and he goes voluntarily, which tells you how bad things are. Facing a murder charge, he makes a deal with Fairfax: he'll return to prison and help another inmate get out. The job belongs to Norden, and Fairfax wants him sprung. For a man who spent the first episode of the series swearing he'd never see the inside of a cell again, it's a grim return ticket. Murder charges concentrate the mind wonderfully.

And the plan works, which is the problem. Spider and Norden break out together, and once they're over the wall Norden disappears, leaving a dead warden behind him. The escape goes exactly as arranged and nothing about it goes right. Spider is out, but he's out holding the bag: the warden's death is on the night's work, and the one man who can clear it up has gone to ground.

Edward Boyd and Kenneth Royce wrote it, Alan Grint directed, and the prison setting gives the series a change of scenery it makes the most of. Stephen Yardley's Spider works the gap between doing the job and surviving it, with Don Henderson's Bulman, Dennis Blanch's Willis, Vivienne McKee's Maggie and Mark Dignam's Fairfax around him. Sarah Bullen plays Lucy Mahler, Peter Marinker is Norden, and David Hargreaves, Garrick Hagon and Norman Jones fill out the cell block. It went out on the fifteenth of July 1977.

It's the neatest trick the series has pulled: a jailbreak episode where the audience is rooting for the jailbird and against the men who put him there, while the one honest figure in the story is the detective chasing him. The title says law and order, but the episode's sympathy sits with the man climbing the wall, which is probably exactly where this show always wanted it.