There was a time when the man on the Clapham omnibus was the gauge of popular arbitration, but today that role is taken by Twitter. Which is why, barely minutes after last night’s Line Of Duty finale, the show was trending like a particularly virulent rash.
To say the ending of Jed Mercurio’s police procedural met with a mixed response would be something of an understatement, but on reflection, it had been building to a denouement that could have gone in any direction. Even if TV logic is that the crowd must always be pleased, and any whodunnit ends with a big reveal and a belligerent “I would have got away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids”, Mercurio's masterpiece has consistently defied convention and gone out of its way to baffle and, even, infuriate.
After seven, utterly compelling weeks, he ended our collective misery by somewhat resolving not only the sixth season, but the many spaghetti strands that had threaded unanswered through all six series of, arguably, the most addictive television series in a generation. Crucially, however, several ends were left open. In the process, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as the big reveal, the unmasking of the super villain supposedly orchestrating all the bad stuff for nine years turned out to be monumental dimwit Buckells. As Steve Arnott remarks when the so-called fourth “H” is finally identified, he'd been “hiding in plain sight”. “All the time we were sitting here thinking we were chasing a criminal mastermind, but no,” says Ted Hastings. “Your corruption was mistaken for incompetence.”
There is some precedent for such a character: Gus Frings, Giancarlo Esposito’s character in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, manages to be a mild-mannered fried chicken chain manager by day and an utterly ruthless methamphetamine kingpin by night. See also Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects. Buckells, on the other hand, managed to be so incredibly stupid that it was hard to imagine how he’d risen through the ranks to become a superintendent without someone’s guiding hand. After all, you’d question whether his serial misspelling of “definately” would have escaped the notice of his performance reviewers. Even though, during his interrogation scene last night (Mercurio and director Jennie Darnell top-trolling us with with Buckells' long drawn-out arrival at AC-12 in which we only saw someone in a prison sweatshirt and handcuffs, and a lot of knowing glances as he approached the ‘glass box’), he went from nervous “no comment” responses to a more confident assertion: “You lot treat everyone like mugs. Who’s the mug now?”. Still, though, there was no sense that Buckells wasn’t anything more than a muppet being played by some higher authority. Just think of that scene in his prison cell when slimy lawyer Jimmy Lakewell was garrotted in front of him, to his clear distress. That was not the response of a ruthless, cat-stroking, hollowed out volcano-dwelling master villain.
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| Public Dimwit No.1 - Ian Buckells Picture: BBC |
And here’s where there is justification to the claims that Mercurio failed to resolve Line Of Duty in any meaningful way last night. If Buckells was the OCG's supremo, then we’ve all been wasting our time over multiple series. More aggravation was to come with absolutely no revelation about dodgy Chief Constable Philip Osborne, whose possible guilt had been alluded to from the outset of Season 6 with some of the pre-publicity, or indeed his wouldn’t-trust-them-as-far-as-you-could-throw-them underlings, Deputy Chief Constable Andrea Wise, or the insanely passive-aggressive Patricia Carmichael. But here, though, is where I strongly believe that Mercurio has been quite royally taking the piss. And it’s also why people shouldn’t be losing their sense of humour, either. Because if you take a somewhat perverse view of it, Line Of Duty has, simply, been ridiculous fun. Yes, it has, on final reflection, felt like something of a parable to contemporary events, with the undercurrent of murky goings on at the very top, but at the end of the day, it has always been a police procedural. Not since the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s has real police corruption been as institutionalised as Line Of Duty has portrayed (BBC2’s excellent series, Bent Coppers: Crossing The Line Of Duty, which ran concurrently, skillfully documented just how bad things once got within the Met), but then that wasn’t the point. This was Cluedo, Columbo and The Masked Singer on a different scale. Each week, Mercurio applied more twists and turns than the Nürburgring, throwing in red herrings and intricate plot combinations that related to a master story arc that has spanned all six seasons. He was, in many respects, just messing with us.
And still is. The absence of full resolution last night has enticingly left things open for a seventh series. No one - Mercurio, the cast, the BBC - is yet talking about one (The Sun today claims that Martin Compston is only halfway-through a new two-series contract for the show) - but with so many planted seeds left unflowered, you wouldn’t bet against ultimate resolution being addressed. Not only to see Osborne, Wise or Carmichael brought down, but the role of widow Steph Corbett made more clear, or the possibility of potentially iffy detective Chris Lomax unveiled as another OCG plant, or even more to be made of Jimmy Nesbitt’s bizarre photographic turn-only as corrupt ex-copper Marcus Thurwell. And what about junior detective Chloe Bishop? The AC-12 member who actually seemed to do most of the hard work, and yet so little is known of her, least of which whether she could still be the Chloe who was the eldest daughter of DCI Tony Gates, chief antagonist of Season 1.
There is a chance that Mercurio left things so infuriatingly up in the air deliberately. Why is obviously unknown. One theory (well, my theory) is that he simply wants us to make up our own minds. This is how David Chase ended The Sopranos: Tony, Carmela, Meadow and Anthony Jr. meeting in a diner, the door opens, Tony looks up and the scene fades to black, followed by Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. Pound-for-pound, television’s greatest series ended with television’s greatest ever scene. Line Of Duty appeared to conclude with somewhat similar ambiguity. A few minutes before the end, the mood changed. Steve and Kate met for a pint. And then the epilogue revealed Jo Davidson to be in witness protection with a new lover and a dog, living in a generously-proportioned chocolate box house in the wilds of somewhere. The cuckooed Terry Boyle was moved into to a home. The wronged Farida Jatri returned to duty at that notorious nest of vipers, Hillside Lane nick (yep, another “H”...). Darren Hunter was finally brought in for the racist murder of Lawrence Christopher. Closure, but not quite. Hastings took the down elevator to retirement, the guilt of causing John Corbett’s brutal murder unloaded onto Patricia Carmichael, now the empress of anti-corruption and yet with a lot of questions to answer about her own motivation.
Most heinous of all, Osborne - the nasty piece of work from Season 1, who, as a Chief Inspector, had instructed his officers to lie over a mistaken police shooting - is still swanning about as top cop of Central Police. “I give you my personal assurance that any failings in the original inquiry will be thoroughly investigated,” he gloats to the TV cameras on the steps of police headquarters. “Lessons will be learned. Throughout my career, whenever I’ve encountered wrongdoing, I’ve acted. But let me be clear: these are the misdeeds of a few rotten apples. And to invoke institutionalised police corruption is an outrageous lie and an insult to my officers. The public don’t want police officers to be held to account for every little thing they’re meant to have done. They want us to get on with the job, and that’s what we will do.” As he says this, Hastings looks crestfallen. Even Carmichael looks conflicted. “Currently AC-12’s powers to curb wrongdoings in public office have never been weaker,” is the simple strapline running across the screen as the title music and end credits roll. Ambiguous with a capital A. “Currently”. Think about that.
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| Picture: BBC |
If there is to be a seventh series, there would clearly be much to end it with. My view is that Mercurio has effectively left the BBC with no other option than to commission one more run, such are the number of open ends to be resolved to the public’s satisfaction, and to possibly avoid civil unrest. Trial by Twitter is a terrible thing, but whatever the opinion on last night’s finale, there’s no denying that Line Of Duty has got the nation talking. That’s no idle remark. Newspapers don’t devote acres of space to something if it’s not of public interest, so when you even get the broadsheets devoting copious column inches to writing about the show, you know that it has achieved maximum Zeitgeist. Even the curmudgeons moaning about everyone going on about the final episode can’t ignore the fact that…everyone is going on about the final episode. The BBC has a very unique property on his hands, and with audience numbers weekly reaching more than 50% of the viewership at 9pm on a Sunday night, even an underwhelming final episode has generated insane amounts of publicity that most other drama series can only dream of. It would do well to think carefully about its next move.
Line Of Duty began in 2012 on BBC2 as an obscure midweek drama. In its sixth series, whose production was interrupted by the pandemic, it has provided further escapist claustrophobia at a time when the nation is just starting to emerge from lockdown. It would be a bold claim to say that it has brought the country together, but there’s no denying that it has, over the past seven Sundays, elicited a mass conversation amongst families, friends, WhatsApp groups and strangers alike. Whatever your opinion of the finale, can you remember anything that has brought so many of us together in collective discourse, frothing over what was, at the end of the day, just a bit of Sunday night telly? Absurd when you think about it. But what a lot of fun it’s been.
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