Dangerous Games

The trouble in "Dangerous Games" starts inside the building, not out on the canals. Someone at police headquarters is leaking. The leaks are not gossip; they are enough to wreck the handling of three live cases, and the one thread tying those cases together is Wim, Piet's son, who finds himself pulled into all three.

That is a neat piece of unease. The enemy is not a clever crimelord but a colleague with a loose mouth, or a paid one. Piet has to work the fallout as a private war against his own department, the people who are meant to have his back. He cannot trust the machinery, so he falls back on instinct and on Wim, which only tightens the knot. The pressure lands on Wim hardest, and the episode is quietly good at showing a father and son caught on the same hook, each unsure how far the other can be protected.

Barry Foster is Van der Valk, with Meg Davies as Arlette and Richard Huw as Wim. Ronald Hines plays Samson. Around them sit the faces of the leak's aftermath: Tony Rohr as Hugo Molders, Trevor Peacock as Johnny Retz, Ian Gelder as Basten, John Vine as Jan Klees, Robert Morgan as Visser, and Natasha Pyne as Janet. Nicolas Freeling and Don Shaw wrote it; Jim Goddard directed.

What I find refreshing is the scale. There is no bomb, no hostage, no grand conspiracy. The damage is institutional, a slow corrosion of trust, and the show treats that as serious enough on its own. Watching Piet chase a traitor through corridors he knows by heart gives the hour a sour, enclosed feeling that the open-air Amsterdam cases rarely carry. It is not a comfortable watch, and it does not want to be. The revival earns its cynicism here more than in any of the louder stories around it.