Enemy

Van der Valk opens its third season with a chill that lands close to home. Death threats arrive for him and for Arlette, and the hunt is on for a hidden enemy who might strike at any second. The season begins in a taut, watchful mood, with the menace aimed less at a stranger than at the detective himself.

This is personal in a way the series rarely allows. The threats arrive not as background noise but as direct pressure on Van der Valk and the woman he shares his life with. He is pushed into a reactive posture, weighing every possible source of harm while trying to work out the shape of the conspiracy closing in. The suspicion, naturally enough, falls on people he knows. Trusted faces in his own professional orbit turn into suspects, and the writing is canny about the unease that breeds between them. Van der Valk has to consider not only who wants him dead but why the attack has come now, and what it means that the danger reaches into his own home. The result is an episode that keeps its hero off balance, a position Foster wears well.

Barry Foster carries the strain as Van der Valk, with Joanna Dunham back as Arlette. Nigel Stock plays Samson and Jim Norton is Hanson, while Donald Gee takes Tahlen and Brian Gwaspari is Marken. Marilyn Finlay appears as a receptionist and Kathleen Moffatt as a nurse. Mike Vardy directed from a script by Paul Wheeler and Nicolas Freeling.

What makes the thing tick is the suggestion that the danger isn't something out there to be processed and filed away. It has worked its way into his private life, and the case asks him to face how thin his own security really is. That is a sharper note than the usual procedural puzzle, and the season is richer for striking it early.

And the quiet pleasure of it, for a regular viewer, is watching Foster play a man who is usually three steps ahead now forced to glance over his shoulder. The threat never quite resolves into a tidy shape, which is rather the point.