She's Out: Episode 1

Eight years at Holloway, and the world Dolly Rawlins walks back into has not stopped moving without her. She is released, chauffeured around London by someone else's arrangement, and delivered to a manor house where the faces waiting for her all have plans of their own. Ester Freeman has worked out where the money is: the diamonds Dolly hid away. She gathers the other ex-convicts at the Grange Health Farm to help her get at it.

But the personal side of the episode lands through Audrey Withey. Shirley's mother blames Dolly for her daughter's death, and she pushes her son Mike to bring Dolly down over the diamond robbery. Then she lets slip that she has the diamonds herself, which puts her loyalties somewhere between unreliable and entertaining. Through it all Dolly keeps her own idea close: a home for unwanted children and battered wives. When Ester moves to buy the very house she dreams of, Dolly picks up the phone to a fence.

Lynda La Plante wrote it, Ian Toynton directed. Ann Mitchell's Dolly carries the weight of the years, and Linda Marlowe's Ester Freeman glides through the scheming without breaking stride. Maureen Sweeney, Anna Patrick, Zoe Heyes, Indra Ové and Maggie McCarthy make up the ex-convict sisterhood, Kate Williams's Audrey burns with resentment, Adrian Rawlins's DS Mike Withey is caught between his mother and his job, and Hugh Quarshie's DCI Ron Craigh keeps an eye on the lot.

What stays with you is the shared history. These women did time together, and that binds harder than any criminal motive. The Grange Health Farm may be changing hands, but the faces around the table are the ones who left Holloway in the same van. Dolly walks out of the gate with eight years behind her and is straight back in the middle of it before the day is out. Old debts do not dissolve with a release date.