Smiley Sets a Trap

Smiley has what he needs, and now he starts to stir. He goes back to the men Control suspected, the shortlist for the mole, and lets them feel the investigation moving under their feet. Along the way he rules two names out: his own, and one other. The list is shorter now, and the room to hide is smaller. The title promises a trap, and the episode is in no hurry to spring it.

Then come the confrontations. Smiley does it the way he does everything, which is slowly and in the right order. He sits across from the suspects one by one and hands them the results of his digging, a polite way of saying he embarrasses them thoroughly. After that, the waiting. And into the middle of that stillness drops the news that Jim Prideaux has disappeared. He was the man who went to Czechoslovakia for Control, and his disappearance is the story's way of saying the mole is still moving.

John le Carré and Arthur Hopcraft wrote it, John Irvin directed it, and it went out on 15 October 1979. Alec Guinness leads as Smiley, with Joss Ackland as Jerry Westerby, Bernard Hepton as Toby Esterhase, Michael Jayston as Peter Guillam, Anthony Bate as Sir Oliver Lacon, George Sewell as Mendel and Hywel Bennett as Ricki Tarr. Jerry Westerby is a new face in the frame, and Joss Ackland makes him count. Ian Bannen's Prideaux is felt most keenly in his absence, and John Wells is the Headmaster with Betty Hardy as his mother.

It is another hour built on quiet moments, and the quiet ones are the most disruptive. No action sequence could match the sight of a suspect being handed the evidence against him. The trap, when it springs, does so almost politely. The episode trusts the audience to feel the temperature drop. And Prideaux's disappearance lands harder than any of the revelations that came before it.