Russell Lewis once more demonstrates that he's seen a lot of films and read a lot of books, which some may think doesn't need to be made clear to us yet again. This time, the central situation is taken directly from Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon", with a bank stick-up going wrong and the staff and customers (who include the soon-to-be- promoted Morse) being taken hostage whilst police marksmen hover outside and a media circus starts to brew. During his desperate hours as a hostage, Morse manages to find new evidence for the case he's working on (actually on bank premises), and solves the case rather cleverly. We then get the second homage to "Dirty Harry" in this brief season, as he bluffs the chief robber into believing his gun is empty. Russell Lewis must really like that film. Still, Morse is the underdog in the scene (unlike Harry Callahan), which gives it a bit of extra edge, and the episode is generally enjoyable. It could be that Lewis intends all his little allusions to form one big allusion, to the habit French film-makers had in the 60s of including "hommages" to other directors and writers they admired. One may murmur, not for the first time, that Jean-Luc Godard has a lot to answer for.