Dead on Arrival

Dead on Arrival takes Van der Valk to England and hands the case to a man who reads the future. A Dutch clairvoyant, used by the police to solve crimes, is asked over to help with a murder inquiry that has sat cold for eight years. The setting is a change for the series too, with Van der Valk working on English ground where his usual methods count for less. When the man starts describing things he could not know, Van der Valk is staggered, and the old case cracks open again.

The interest is in the clash of methods. Here is a detective who trusts what he can prove, faced with results that arrive as visions. The episode leans on that unease: a cold case reopened not by evidence but by a stranger's dreams. The local officers and Van der Valk are forced to rethink what they thought they knew, and the supernatural element sits oddly inside the usual police work. It is a stretch for the format, and the episode knows it.

Barry Foster plays Van der Valk, with Joanna Dunham as Arlette and Nigel Stock as Samson. Richard Davies is Lloyd and Bob Hoskins appears as Johnny Palmer. Brian Poyser plays Finch and Pamela Salem is Millie Sanger. Michael Culver is James. William Hootkins is Frank Garvin and Roger Kemp plays Wainwright. Patrick O'Brian and Nicolas Freeling wrote it; Ted Childs directed.

What the hour does is test how far the series will bend toward the uncanny. The clairvoyant carries the plot, and the pleasure is watching a hard-headed policeman decide what to believe. The procedural grit stays in place even as the premise floats free of it.

And the casting of Hoskins as Palmer is a small treat, a familiar face in a strange setting. The revelations, when they land, are less about the psychic gift than about a past nobody wanted disturbed.