Craven's investigations soon lead him into a murky world of government and corporate cover-ups and nuclear espionage, pitting him against dark forces that threaten the future of life on Earth.

Writer Troy Kennedy Martin was greatly influenced by the political climate of the time, dominated by the Thatcher government, and the aura of secrecy surrounding the nuclear industry – and by the implications of the Gaia hypothesis of environmentalist James Lovelock; these combined to him writing a thriller that mingled real world concerns with mythic and mystical elements.

Kennedy Martin's original ending was more fantastic than that eventually used in the finished serial: he had proposed that Craven would turn into a tree but this was vetoed by members of the cast and crew.

Yorkshire police officer Ronald Craven is returning home with his daughter Emma having picked her up from a meeting of an environmental organisation at her university campus.

Travelling to London to assist with the inquiry, he is contacted by Pendleton, a polished official "attached to the Prime Minister's office", who informs him that Emma was known to them as a terrorist and that she may have been the gunman's target.

After Craven makes a televised appeal for information about Emma's killer, he is contacted by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent Darius Jedburgh, an associate of Harcourt and Pendleton.

There, an inquiry is taking place into the sale of International Irradiated Fuels (IIF) at Northmoor, run by Robert Bennett to the Fusion Corporation of Kansas, owned by Jerry Grogan.

Through a contact of Mac (Struan Roger), a colleague from his time in Northern Ireland, Craven gains access to a terminal connected to the MI5 computer.

The Minister counters that Northmoor were doing so for the Ministry of Defence via an experimental method, were therefore exempt from normal regulation, and that he had been aware since the secret program's start.

Arriving late at the conference is Grogan, who announces that the British government has approved his company's purchase of IIF and speaks with cold passion of harnessing the power of the atom.

Emma's ghost appears to Craven and tells him of a time when black flowers grew, warming the Earth and preventing life from becoming extinct.

Several other faces familiar to British viewers appeared during the course of the episodes, including John Woodvine (as Craven's superior DCS Ross), Tim McInnerny (as Emma's boyfriend Terry Shields), Hugh Fraser (as IIF chief executive Robert Bennett), Kenneth Nelson as Grogan, Zoë Wanamaker (as intelligence agent Clementine), Allan Cuthbertson (as Chilwell of the Investigation Committee) and Blake's 7 cast members David Jackson (as Colonel Lawson) and Brian Croucher (as Northmoor security chief Connors).

Playing themselves were television reporters Sue Cook and Kenneth Kendall, weatherman Bill Giles and Labour MP Michael Meacher.

[17] Aside from the Clapton/Kamen soundtrack, Willie Nelson's "The Time of the Preacher", New Model Army's "Christian Militia", and Tom Waits' "16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six" are featured in the series.

[18] "I am writing this story about a detective who turns into a tree" was what writer Troy Kennedy Martin told his colleagues when asked what he was working on during the early 1980s.

[15] The election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan as President of the United States had brought about a major shift in the global political landscape.

A particular influence was the speech made by President Ronald Reagan on 23 March 1983 announcing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) which proposed protecting the United States from attack by nuclear missiles.

[15] One of the supporters of SDI was Lyndon LaRouche, on whom Kennedy Martin based the character of Jerry Grogan, owner of the Fusion Corporation of Kansas.

[15] Although Kennedy Martin's notion for the serial was influenced by real political events, he had for a long time railed against naturalism in television drama – most notably in a 1964 article for the theatre magazine Encore, titled "Nats Go Home.

[24] Realism and authenticity was provided by the appearances of real life television presenter Sue Cook and Labour MP Michael Meacher.

Kennedy Martin, influenced by John Darragh's The Real Camelot (Thames and Hudson, 1981) which examined the pagan origins of the Arthurian legend, saw Craven as a modern-day Green Man who would confront the threats to the Earth on behalf of Gaia.

[19] These aspects would reach their apotheosis in the serial's conclusion in which Kennedy Martin envisaged that Craven, having found the plutonium stolen by Jedburgh, would be shot by a sniper and would be transformed into a tree.

[14] By 1983, Jonathan Powell was keen to put the serial into production and offered the scripts to producer Michael Wearing who was immediately impressed by the scenes in the first episode, "Compassionate Leave", depicting Craven's reaction to Emma's death, describing them as "the most sustained evocation of individual grief in bereavement that I can remember".

However, some elements of Kennedy Martin's original vision persist in the final script: for example, in episode three, "Burden of Proof", the ghost of Emma urges Craven, as he undergoes a breakdown, to be strong, like a tree.

[28] As the shoot progressed it became apparent to the cast and crew that they had a potential hit on their hands; Bob Peck recalled, "I think we knew when we were making it that it was a good piece of work"[32] while Kennedy Martin told reporters "I haven't had this feeling about something for 20 years.

[34] The critical response was generally positive with most commentators concentrating their praise on Peck's performance as Craven and the scale of the programme's political themes.

[23] "A good television thriller is very hard to find but Edge of Darkness promises to be one of the best", wrote Celia Brayfield in The Times, "The central character is played by Bob Peck, who has the gift of looking tragic and intelligent simultaneously.

This Week's “Death on the Rock” (1988) about the killing of three Provisional IRA members in Gibraltar and Secret Society (1987) about undisclosed matters of public interest which led to the sacking of BBC Director-General Alasdair Milne) and fiction (e.g. the films Defence of the Realm (1985) and The Whistle Blower (1987) and the television serials A Very British Coup (1988) and Traffik (1989)).

[44] Fred Inglis, in his analysis of the serial in Formations: 20th Century Media Studies, takes it "as one of the most remarkable works of art made for British television".

[56] In 2003, BBC Worldwide re-issued Edge of Darkness on DVD (encoded for both regions 2 and 4) with several extra features including Magnox: The Secrets of Edge of Darkness, a specially made "making-of" documentary; an isolated soundtrack of Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen's score; a Bob Peck interview from BBC Breakfast Time; a contemporary report on the programme's BAFTA wins and coverage of the programme's wins at the Broadcasting Press Guild awards.