Widows II: Episode 3

Everything that can go wrong with a handover does. The women gather to go over the plan one last time, and the details are the sort that make you wince: Linda builds a dummy for her car, Micky fixes things so Shirley can join a modelling agency, and Shirley's mother rings with news that she is pregnant, which puts the meeting somewhere near the bottom of Shirley's mind. Then Linda, told in plain terms not to, goes out and buys a gun.

Dolly phones Harry and sets the meeting. The money is nearly handed over when Linda and Bella arrive late, and Harry, in a hurry to get away, runs Linda over. She dies on the spot. The plan was to betray him, and instead he has taken one of them, and the whole thing is over in a second. Dolly takes the gun to his old house. He isn't there. Vic Morgan, the private investigator, finds her standing outside holding it.

Maureen O'Farrell's Linda has been the loose end of the series for a while, drinking and blabbing, and the show kills her without ceremony, which is exactly right. The cast around it holds: Ann Mitchell's Dolly, Fiona Hendley's Shirley, Debby Bishop's Bella, Maurice O'Connell's Harry, Stephen Yardley's Vic Morgan, Kate Williams as Audrey Withey, Andrew Kazamia as Micky Tesco, Christopher Whitehouse as Gordon Murphy and Mike Felix as Eddie Bates. Lynda La Plante wrote it, Paul Annett directed.

The episode's real subject is timing. Everyone is late, everyone is distracted, and the one person who is exactly on time is Harry, in a car, in a hurry. Linda's death is the moment the series stops being a caper, and Dolly standing in the street with a gun and nowhere to point it is the best image it has produced yet.