The Detrimental Robot

The escape from Law and Order has consequences, and they arrive immediately. Spider is on the run with his fellow escapee, which was always going to be trouble, because the man who helped him out of jail has his own agenda and his own enemies. The police are only part of the pursuit now. Bulman is close enough to feel. And the rest of the pack is less picky about procedure.

It all funnels towards a hostage situation, and the show raises its own stakes with a bluntness it usually keeps for later: two detectives are killed. That changes the tone of the chase. Bulman's pursuit stops being professional and starts being personal, and Don Henderson plays the shift beautifully, all the patience of the series burning off in a single hour. For Spider, caught between the man hunting him and the men hunting his partner, there's nowhere left to be clever.

Edward Boyd and Kenneth Royce wrote it, Alan Grint directed, and it went out on the twenty-second of August 1977. Stephen Yardley's Spider is back on the run, with Don Henderson's Bulman, Dennis Blanch's Willis and Vivienne McKee's Maggie in the cast. Norman Jones returns as Dero, Sarah Bullen as Lucy Mahler, with Chris Jenkinson as Kurt Torless, Tony Jay as Jacob Mahler, and John Price and Ray Mort as the unlucky detectives Pearson and King.

The title is one of those seventies names that sounds as though it escaped from a different script entirely, but the hour itself is straight, serious action. There's no room for the series' usual playfulness. The run that started as Fairfax's scheme has turned into something no one controls, and the body count is the show's way of saying the old rules are off. It's the darkest stretch of the season, and it earns it.