isn’t she a panic?

A return from an old regular and a heart-breaking end to one of the show's best Regular/Guest star dynamics.

George Costigan is wonderful as Roxanne, with an effortless warmth, dry wit and charisma that does a really good job of following on from Paul O'Grady's earlier performance. I want to save a deep dive into the Ted/Roxanne relationship for another post, but it needs to be said both George and Tony do a wonderful job of converying a lot with a relatively understated script.

Ted's return is also very well handled just from a returning character perspective. Where the character is makes sense with how he left, and he gets to interact with just about everyone you'd expect him to and his immediate digging at Andrew, Matt and Jack is a lot of fun. Having him mention Roy and Frank also makes me very happy.

The dynamic with Jim is the main one here, though, and it's delightfully layered. Jim trying to pull the clever moves on Ted and having it backfire because he just isn't Ted, or Frank, or really that kind of copper at all is a nice touch, as is Jim showing backbone regarding Ted's attitude towards his alcoholism (and Ted's own).

This two-parter is actually really strong for Jim over all. Between the drinking, the growing cynicism and complaceny ahead of his tenure, and the resulting spiral of his anger issues, Jim hasn't gotten to just be good in a long while, and it's nice if a bit sad to see these glimpses of the man and officer he could have been in a kinder world.

A truly wonderful piece of story telling carried by a cracking performance by Robert Hudson.

The first half of the story is Yorkie being the first on scene to a fatal car crash. Other incidents have held up the other emergency services, and the chaos quickly spirals as Yorkie struggles to keep control of the scene. The main part of this sequence lasts barely over 10 minutes, but it does so much in those ten minutes it feels like a whole episode in itself. The pacing and limited perspective of this part work wonderfully - things fall apart piece by piece, one decision after the other. On a first watch, the viewer is absolutely on that journey with Yorkie as he does his best while trying to work through the shock of what he's witnessed and obstructed by an uncooperative crowd, and it really does feel like he's doing the best he can in each moment, but as help starts to arrive and the perspective starts to expand out, we can see the problems caused by those decisions and the actions he did and didn't take. Tom's harsh criticism when he arrives on scene feels so unfair in the moment, and the whole thing is just a great example of how different a crisis feels when you're in the middle of it vs the outside looking in and the benefits of hindsight that you rarely get with the more third-person omniscient type of narrative that is more typical of a TV show.