The Ties That Bind

A former judge is shot dead, and Piet is pulled in to make sense of it. The obvious suspect is caught quickly enough, but the confession is the strange part. The man admits the killing and then adds, almost in passing, that someone else had already reached the woman first. That single line opens a second door, and the episode walks through it rather than shutting it. You can feel the relief of the arrest curdle into something more complicated.

The second thread is Wim's, and it is uglier. He is running a drug case that turns out to share a wall with the judge's murder, and the two investigations are forced to meet. Piet has to work both at once, father and detective tangled in the same knot, and the interest lies in watching which loyalty wins when they pull in opposite directions.

Barry Foster is Van der Valk, with Meg Davies as Arlette and Richard Huw as Wim. Ronald Hines is Samson. The rest of the cast fills in the connections: Brian Cox as Stefan Szabo, Malcolm Tierney as Rinus Nagel, Terence Rigby as Karl Vessem, Anthony Valentine as Charles Mehra, Maria Miles as Helena Pel, and Natasha Pyne as Janet. Nicolas Freeling and Kenneth Ware wrote it; Anthony Simmons directed.

I think the episode's strength is its impatience with a single clean answer. The judge's death could have been a neat one-and-done, but the writing insists the personal and the criminal are the same story. Brian Cox, early in a long career, gives the proceedings a hard edge as Szabo. It is a solid, slightly brooding opener to the final series, confident enough to leave some threads dangling. The revival had learned by now that a Van der Valk case works best when the private and the professional refuse to be separated.