Season for Love

A rich, middle-aged American flies into Amsterdam to meet her young lover, and he isn't there. No message, no explanation. Just gone. She spends the episode worrying about his safety; Van der Valk spends it worrying about hers. It is a neat division of labour, and it keeps two questions alive at once: where has the young man gone, and what sort of trouble is the woman standing in?

That split in the worry is what makes this one tick. To the woman, this is a missing-person case with a romantic shape: something has happened to her young man and she needs him found. To Van der Valk, watching how everyone around the situation behaves, the missing man may not be the one in danger at all. A wealthy woman alone in a foreign city, hunting a lover nobody else will admit to knowing about, is exactly the sort of person trouble finds profitable. His instinct says the two worries are really one worry wearing different clothes. The case only makes sense once you accept that, and the hour is patient enough to wait for you.

The show handles money and romance well here without sneering at either. An older woman with a younger man invites a certain kind of remark, and the episode mostly declines to make it. What interests it is who benefits from the arrangement and who doesn't. The answers turn out to be more mercenary than romantic, which is usually how this show likes them.

Philip Broadley wrote it with Nicolas Freeling, and Mike Vardy directed. Barry Foster leads as Van der Valk, Michael Latimer plays Kroon and Susan Travers is Arlette. Lisa Daniely appears as Margo Roslin and Shane Briant as Ko Brinkman, with John Bailey as Claus Huisman, Peter Blythe as Max, Ronald Leigh-Hunt as Paul Bekker and Donald Morley as Dr. Stapper.

A case that starts as a search for one person quietly turns into protection of another. I like the way the danger migrates while nobody's looking.