A fast-paced, complicated episode that really needs watching a few times to try to make sense of what is happening! The ep is also high on well-choreographed action sequences. In fact the chase scenes involving the RS2000 are fantastic! Much of the dialogue is clipped and snappy, too. However the ep as broadast has a number of problems...

The plot concerns a crime/terror group with certain political aims that is currently enjoying a period of peaceful negotations between its head, Mr Albie, and the authorities. However two of its members, Duffy (Michael Kitchen) and Glover (James Cosmo), are vehemently opposed to the talks and want to get the Organisation "active" again. They decide to frame Albie for raids on a gun shop and a casino and, ultimately, a bomb planted outside some Government buildings. The two villains carry out these acts themselves but precede each with an anonymous tipoff to CI5 with a codeword usually used by the Organisation. As anticipated, Cowley's mob and the Organisation are soon at each other's throats, the latter protesting its innocence, though Albie correctly suspects Duffy and Glover have set him up. An ex-CI5 man, Morgan, becomes embroiled in proceedings as he had once tried to infiltrate the Organisation, while his girlfriend, Sylvie, works at a club frequented by Organisation men. Using the ensuing confusion to his advantage, Duffy pursues an additional agenda: he also wants to hit back at Doyle in revenge for the shooting of his brother a few years previously.

All this should have made for a superb rollercoaster ride of an episode but unfortunately the wheels fall off as too many little elements just don't figure or connect...

In fact I'm going to have to use spoilers here to try to explain the myriad problems, so if you'd rather not know what happens, look away!

The political motivations of the Organisation are never explained at all, so Albie and co simply come across as murderous gangsters.

Although the sequence where Bodie is almost "knee-capped" is great to watch, it doesn't make sense in the context of the story. Following Bodie's brief detention of one the Organisation's henchmen, Albie sanctions revenge - in which he is happy for Doyle to be hit, too - yet he also tells his deputy, Ted, that he doesn't want to start a "war" with CI5. Huh?

There's also poor continuity when Doyle first meets Sylvie at Morgan's flat. Ray subsequently asks Bodie to check her out at the club but later on, when the lads are examining surveillance photos, Bodie has to ask who she is!?!

Morgan's motives are utterly obscure. Having been thrown out of CI5 (for reasons only vaguely hinted at), he makes it clear that he doesn't want to get involved with helping Doyle to investigate the gun robbery as he now has a new life. Yet throughout the episode he wants to know what is going on in the Organisation. Is he looking for a way in to hit back at CI5 ?

We learn that Morgan was felt ideally placed to infiltrate the Organisation because his wife at the time, Alice, had relatives who were connected with it. Doyle meets with Alice who claims she is now "well out of it" but immediately following the conversation Doyle catches her making a mysterious phone call (her claim that she was trying to reserve a room at the high-class hotel Claridge's was clearly sarcastic). Naturally he suspects that she was warning somebody in the Organisation that she had been approached by CI5 but this thread of the story is never taken any further.

Later we see a surveillance photo of Duffy and Morgan talking together but it's not explained why they would associate with each other - particularly given their stand-offish encounter at the club. And when Morgan later tells Doyle he has some information somebody gave him, what exactly is this and from whom did he get it? Presumably he was referring to Sylvie and the fact that she has been told of the planned casino robbery. But who is Morgan referring to when he says he wants to "see somebody who deserves to be pushed aside get what's coming."? Does he mean Duffy?

Sylvie's involvement with proceedings is confusing to say the least! Although the audience knows that Duffy feeds her the information about The Organisation being "active" and the planned casino robbery as a further ploy to frame the group, surely both she and, especially, Morgan should have been suspicious that a humble barmaid would be freely given such information?! Of course we know that she and Duffy have started an affair but Morgan isn't aware of that.

My take on this is that Duffy discovered from Sylvie that Morgan was Doyle's contact. So Duffy used Sylvie to ensure Morgan received more "dirt" about Albie in the full knowledge that Morgan would run to Doyle with it, thus bringing the latter out into the open to be killed with the one gun that was not recovered from the earlier raid. So Doyle would be dead, killed with a gun apparently stolen by the Organisation: Duffy would therefore have achieved both of his aims. But in the ensuing ambush Morgan gets hit instead. That scene is actually pivotal to the whole story but was filmed in such a clumsy manner that the viewer doesn't know whether Morgan was the intended target or not. If not, then why didn't Duffy get off a second shot to hit Doyle? (The novelisation makes it clear that both Morgan and Doyle were targets).

Why doesn't Doyle offer his condolences to Morgan's ex-wife, Alice, when he meets her a little later? He acts as though nothing has happened and behaves similarly when he confronts Sylvie with the photograph of Duffy.

The ending is rather unbelievable. A bomb is planted somewhere in a large car park, yet Bodie and Doyle miraculously discover it in a matter of seconds!?!

Even if you have an unedited version of the story, you could be forgiven for thinking that some vital bits had been lost. In fact I do wonder if Michael Feeney Callan's script was going to overrun the fifty minutes and ended up being hurriedly and badly trimmed at the script editing stage.

In all, it's a shame Mark 1 didn't iron out these problems as there are the makings of a great story here. This could have been one of the best episodes but it is actually by far the worst of the entire series because the plot machinations simply make no sense at all. I agree with Sharon's suggestion below: this should have been a two-parter.

When watching this episode, you really have to forget trying to piece together the plot. Although Duffy's motives are very clear, those of other key characters such as Morgan, Alice, Sylvie and Albie are anything but. Despite the confusion, all cast members put their hearts into it with great and believable performances (which, again, makes me suspect that the script they were working from was far more "complete" than that we see on-screen). There are also some nice subtleties such as the scenes of the carefree children playing in the park (typically, of course, these were cut out in UK satelliite screenings) set against the deadly underground world that the episode centres around. And the final stand-off between Duffy and Doyle compensates to a fair degree for all the problems.

Duffy, on the condemned apartment block where he is hiding out: "Apologies for the regal splendour - the butler's on holiday!"

This is an episode with so much backstory that one viewing is not enough to even begin to understand what's going on. Great failure in overplotting - this should have been done as a two hour film or a to-be-continued in order to give us all we need to know to follow the main plot. As it is, Duffy acts in inscrutable ways and has the oddest connections and very late in the story tells us why he hates Doyle, but... It never, ever gels. Which is too bad because it has great potential.

Further, for non-UKers the "Organization" means nothing. (See the BTW section below -Dave) After a few viewings I figured out it was "organized" crime, but, hey. A little info would have saved a lot of "huh?"

Morgan's character, his ex-wife, Sylvie and Doyle's connection with the first two are all murkily defined. When I show it to newbies I just tell them to watch The Lads and forget the plot.

That said:

Bodie at work causing mayhem with the sunglasses and the attitude is fun to watch. Doyle plays a good counterpart to him in this episode. And the finale with the bomb and the two of them less than a second from death, then giggling in relief, is marvelous.

We get to see a bit more Bodie-skin (a rare and choice treat) when Doyle wakes him up in a girlfriend's flat. Since her keys were still in the door, according to Ray, Bodie must have been very preoccupied the evening before to have been so careless. <G> The dialogue here indicates how close the two men are in matters outside the job, IMO.

Fun to watch: the entire scene where Bodie is nearly shot in the knee. They run and scramble so nicely. Bodie in the betting shop, being brutal. The girlfriend's bedroom scene: are there handcuffs on the bedside table? The bomb defusing. Bodie pouting and Doyle winking. Both Lads walking and talking right after leaving a pub. Doyle from the waist down right after Sylvie shoots Duffy – another grand slo-mo moment.

Good viewing, all in all. But ignore the attempt at a complex plot. It doesn't work.

The gunshop robbery appears to have been filmed in High Street, Shepperton.

The guns were dumped in the small lake in Black Park, Iver - close to Pinewood Studios. (Thanks to Tony Mackay.)

Bryn Dyer came up wih the following suggestions: The playground where Doyle talks to Alice is at Alexandra Palace. The casino shoot-out happened behind the Green Man pub on Muswell Hill Broadway - the club itself used to be called Manhatten Lights. The scenes where Doyle speaks to Sylvie at the bus stop and is seen flying along the road took place at Crouch Hill near the junction of Ashley Road.

A few bloopers related to clothing here: firstly Doyle's sunglasses keep disappearing when he and Bodie are ambushed. The same happens to Bodie when he raids the betting shop. And when Doyle is chasing Glover after the casino robbery, his jacket changes! Actually, it's clear from the changes in the weather that the sequence was filmed over two different days.

As mentioned above, when the lads are going through the surveillance photos, Bodie isn't sure who Syvlvie is, despite the fact he had been checking her out in the club a little while earlier!

In the episode's original script, when the lads try to make the car park bomb safe, they discover that Glover has forgotten to wire up the detonator, rendering the bomb useless. Perhaps Glover simply didn't have the stomach to go through with the bombing? We'll never know.

Michael Kitchen was a long-time boyfriend of Joanna Lumley in the 1970s. Previously seen in an episode of Brian Clemens' Thriller series and a string of guest spots in many TV shows during the 1980s. But didn't really come to prominence until playing Prince Charles in the controversial mini-series To Play the King in 1994. More recently has appeared in a couple of Pierce Brosnan Bond films and can presently be seen alongside Martin Shaw in Always and Everyone.

Barbara Kellerman (Sylvie) played a lead in the Edward Woodward series "1990" and starred as the White Witch in the BBC's Chronicles of Narnia. Also landed a tragic role in my fave horror flick The Monster Club (yes, I just had to give it another mention!)

Australian fans may remember Ed Devereaux (Mr Albie) for the 1960s childrens' series about a cuddly kangaroo, Skippy. He also appeared in The New Avengers episode 'The Midas Touch'. In fact he shuttled between the UK and Oz quite a bit, appearing in some of the early Carry Ons, while landing hard-men roles in The Sweeney and the neat Oz thriller Money Movers. Turned to comedy in Whoops, Apocalypse! and a guest role in Absolutely Fabulous. Passed away in December 2003.

James Cosmo (Glover) has been a very busy character actor throughout the last three decades, notable roles including episodes of The Sweeney, Minder, Spender. Was a regular in the BBC drama series Warship.

Billy Murray (Morgan) went on to great success as a dodgy CID sergeant in The Bill. Now a regular in EastEnders.