I don't usually post reviews of episodes on the site, but this one seemed to speak volumes to me... From MediaGuardian:

Nancy Banks-Smith

The Bill (ITV1) is propelled along like an elderly car by a series of disconcerting explosions. It exploded again when a disaffected recruit drove a van full of petrol into Sun Hill station. As far as I could follow his reasoning, it was meant to wake them all up. Which, to be fair, it did.

Except, of course, Marilyn who died in hospital with one of those flat-lining, high-pitched beeps so familiar to viewers of soaps just as Reg was proposing (we'll take that as a no then, Marilyn?), and Andrea, the implausible undercover reporter, who was left to die in the rubble by the station psycho, Gabriel.

Sun Hill is a seething hotbed of bombers, rapists, racists, murderers, alcoholics and undercover reporters. Most of them Gabriel. Whenever I glance at The Bill through splayed fingers, Gabriel is murdering someone else.

Then, in a rather touching codicil, Jim left too. As Jim and June walked beside the Thames at night, a very large punter and a small but spirited prostitute spilled out of a stolen car. Resignedly, they arrested these star-crossed lovers and, in the dark where all cats are grey and people are just people, fell into conversation with them. The punter showed Jim a picture of a baby and asked anxiously if it looked like him. As he was bald, blue-eyed and composed entirely of concentric circles, he looked like any number of babies. "There is a likeness," said Jim, more out of kindness than conviction. He also saw in this man's helplessly hell-bent life, an ominous likeness to his own. It is a pity that The Bill is so fond of blowing things up because, when they don't, they can really write.