Collateral Damage

Bob Tate's ex-wife is running a Special Branch operation, which means the phone call she makes to him is never going to be simple. She talks him into releasing a suspect she needs for her own case, and the moment he does, the whole thing starts unravelling. The suspect is James Patrick Dolan, a terrorist with a Special Branch badge in his pocket, and the arrest that follows sets two departments at each other's throats.

Tate ends up holding the bag for an MI5 operation that officially doesn't exist. His own people start looking at him like he's a liability. But the more he digs, the bigger the conspiracy gets. His ex-wife's name keeps coming up, and so does the phrase 'career-threatening', though by the end even that sounds mild.

Steve Griffiths and Roy Mitchell wrote it, Colin Gregg directed, and the plot is the kind that needs you paying attention in the first fifteen minutes. Departmental politics is the real villain: the squad argues with Special Branch, Special Branch argues with MI5, and somewhere underneath it all there's an actual crime. Brendan Coyle's Tate carries most of it, a decent man making one bad call out of loyalty and then paying for it in instalments.

The rest of the unit fills in around him. Reece Dinsdale's Scott, Robert Willox's Donachie and Gary McDonald's Oxford hold the squad-room end, with Amanda Pays as Dryden and Pooky Quesnel as Grace Harris. David Sterne's Uttley does what he always does, which is look like a man who knows more than he's saying. Tilly Blackwood's Sarah Hendry and Eoin McCarthy's Dolan supply the other-department menace, and John O'Toole's Terrorist does exactly what his name suggests.

It aired in November 1996, and it's one of those conspiracy episodes where the hour runs out before the explanation does. That's forgivable. Watching Tate get squeezed from both sides is the point, and the episode lands it.