A Rose for Mr Reinhart

Arlette is right and her husband isn't, which doesn't happen every week. A young woman is threatened in the park, and where Van der Valk sees one thing his wife's instincts tell her another. She proves truer. That stings a man like Van der Valk more than any reprimand from above.

What follows is him trying to make up for it by going hard after a prominent Amsterdam businessman. The trouble with hounding someone as a form of atonement is that you stop investigating and start prosecuting, and the episode is honest about that. His personal feelings about the man keep threatening to cloud his judgment, and for once we watch the great observer be the least reliable witness in his own case. Kroon and Halsbeek are left to manage the professional demands while their commissaris works through the emotional fallout of having been wrong at the start. Foster plays the sulk beautifully, a man who can interrogate strangers for hours and still not know how to lose a domestic argument.

I find this a more interesting episode than its plot summary suggests. Plenty of crime dramas pay lip service to intuition versus procedure; here the show actually lets the detective lose that argument in front of us, then makes his recovery part of the story. Being wrong is treated as evidence too. The standard the whole hour is measured against is Arlette, whose instincts were right before anyone else's, and the show never lets you forget it.

Peter Yeldham wrote it with Nicolas Freeling, and Mike Vardy directed. Barry Foster leads as Van der Valk, Michael Latimer plays Kroon, Susan Travers is Arlette and Sydney Tafler returns as Halsbeek. James Cossins appears as Martin Noordhoff, Denis Lill as Charles Van Houten, Arne Gordon as Jan Reinhart, Paul Hastings as Erik Masse, Carolyn Courage as Karen Seger and Ingrid Hafner as Annie.

A rose for Mr Reinhart, and a lesson for Mr Van der Valk. Both are handed over rather gracefully.