A View to a Death

Maggie gets Spider out of custody in the opening stretch, and for about five minutes it looks as though the series might finally let him have a quiet life. It doesn't. The release comes with strings attached, the way every release in Spider's life comes with strings attached: he's free, on condition that he risks his neck once more to help catch a foreign agent. The freedom is real and it's borrowed at the same time, and the episode is honest about that from the first scene.

The hunt gives the hour its pace. The agent is elusive, the clock is short, and the people who let Spider out have already decided he's the one to find the man. What makes it watchable is the weariness underneath the action. This is a man who has been used by every side by now, and Stephen Yardley lets you see the calculation behind the compliance. He does the job because the alternative is worse, and he knows the alternative better than most. And nobody has to explain it to him twice.

Edward Boyd and Kenneth Royce wrote it, Alan Grint directed, and it went out on the twenty-ninth of August 1977. Don Henderson's Bulman, Dennis Blanch's Willis and Vivienne McKee's Maggie are all here, with David Hargreaves's Shayne-Wentworth, Chris Jenkinson's Kurt Torless, Sarah Bullen's Lucy Mahler, Tony Jay's Jacob Mahler, Garrick Hagon's David Wiseman and Derry Power's Donnelly completing the cast.

As a closer for the second season it fits. The episode is a reminder that Spider's talent has never once been his own property, and that every door which opens for him opens onto another job. The title promises a death, and the hour delivers on the view if not the final fall, finishing the run the way it started, with the country's best burglar on somebody else's clock.