Widows: Episode 3

Dolly's lie is a good one, and she knows it. Harry is alive, she tells Boxer Davis, who passes the word to the Fisher brothers, and suddenly the whole hunt for the ledgers and the money has a wrong turn in it. It keeps the Fishers guessing, and Dolly's plan gets room to breathe. But lies have a cost, and this episode hands the bill to Boxer. Tony Fisher calls on Eddie Rawlins and lays out everything Boxer has been telling them, which is more than enough to put the frighteners on a nervous man. Eddie, who has his own reasons to be frightened, takes Boxer out, gets him drunk, and leaves him in a back alley. A mysterious driver finishes the job.

The widows are elsewhere, and the mountains are the point of the trip. Dolly, Linda, Shirley and Bella head up into the hills to practise the robbery, running the moves over and over on empty roads until they have them off. It is the most practical the show has been so far, and the most tense, because the ending brings back a face from the dead. Harry Rawlins is alive after all.

The cast keeps its shape, with Ann Mitchell as Dolly, Maureen O'Farrell as Linda, Fiona Hendley as Shirley and Eva Mottley as Bella, plus Maurice O'Connell returning as Harry Rawlins. Dudley Sutton's Boxer Davis and Stanley Meadows's Eddie Rawlins carry the men's side, with David Calder, Paul Jesson and Peter Machin as the police. Lynda La Plante wrote it, Ian Toynton directed.

The episode works because the planning and the violence sit side by side. One minute the women are timing each other on a mountain road, the next a man is run over in an alley for talking too much. That contrast is the show at its best, and Harry's return promises trouble for everyone.