This article contains spoilers
According to rumour, whenever the writers on Eastenders run out of ideas, they turn to classical Greek tragedy for inspiration. Plotlines from ancient plays are allegedly tacked to the wall of the writers' room, and if there’s ever the need for a bit of amped-up drama, they’ll just shove one in to “make it Greek.” Ronnie Mitchell has a secret daughter? Oedipus Rex. Tanya Branning murders her cheating husband by burying him alive? Medea meets Antigone. Denny Rickman Jr dies after he is locked in a room by Ian Beale to get revenge on his father? Shades of The Oresteia. Implausible as it sounds, the writer-comedian Natalie Haynes has done a lot of work uncovering these parallels, and really, it’s not that surprising they crop up so often. Adultery, sibling rivalry, paranoia, betrayal, domestic violence, revenge and occasional incest: this is the bread and butter on which good drama thrives.
Call me an armchair gaffer, but I’d bet money that Jed Mercurio—showrunner on BBC2’s Line of Duty—has a similar crutch for devising storylines. The finale of the long-running police drama, which aired on Sunday night, may have drawn things to an, er, interesting conclusion. But the show still contains all the hallmarks of a dynastic Greek banger. There is gore, sex, tension, and a central preoccupation with loyalty. Procedural interrogations propel the story, burning up to revelations through dialogue. The plot-driving violence often happens off-camera. And the holy trinity at the show’s core—Hastings, Kate and Steve—are like a dysfunctional tight-knit family whose professional values and ambitions are indistinguishable from those governing their personal relationships. Sibling rivalry? Check. Domestic violence? Check. Incest? Hello DI Davidson. Revenge? Enter the OCG (Organised Crime Group). Betrayal? Adultery? Paranoia? Enter the entire cast, plus Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey too. Since there’s a hell of a lot going on here—the show is tensely paced, densely plotted—you have to really pay attention. Phones away, children. You must be completely immersed. Otherwise, you’ll get completely lost.
The sixth season of Line of Duty went like the clappers from the get-go and mother of GOD, was it hard to keep up. AC-12 kicked off Operation Lighthouse to investigate the murder of journalist Gail Vella who, it transpired, was making a true-crime podcast uncovering police corruption at the time she got bumped. This triggered a series of shootings and throat-slashings so relentless you’d be out of the loop if you dared to look away once to google the word “Chis.” RIP Lisa Patel, Carl Banks, Jimmy Lakewell, Marcus Thurwell, RIP Ryan you wee gobshite and RIP—for a short time—Ted Hastings’s career.
In the absence of the energy required to give a full plot recap, here are some other highlights: Kate and Davidson got too close for comfort. Steve tried to flip his painkiller habit but instead got flipped in a van and had bullets sprayed at him from every angle. Hastings got fired and unfired. Ryan got fired and unfired and then shot by Davidson or maybe Kate (still unclear) who faced an existential crisis when Steve showed up at the showdown. DI Davidson’s blood sample revealed a high level of homozygosity (?) leading to the revelation that she was in fact both the daughter and niece of OCG season one lead Tommy Hunter (me neither—hang on, quick google), ultimately connecting to James Nesbitt, dead in a Spanish basement, who was actually—or shall we say definately—under the thumb of Ian Buckells the whole time. Yes: that Ian Buckells.
We’ll get back to him, but in the meantime: what an absolute tangle. Line of Duty is so full of double-turns and obscure self-references, so intricate in its plot mechanics, that it’s no surprise even the cast gets confused. Scottish actor Martin Compston, who plays Steve, recently told the BBC that he is the go-to authority on-set if any of his fellow actors don’t get something in the script. He puts this forensic attention down to the fact that he keeps up his English accent in between filming takes. (Ah, Steve. Ever committed.) But beyond confusion, this anecdote speaks more broadly to the way in which reacting to the show is a naturally discursive event. It has to be dissected to the letter. The letter, fella. And the wider, cultish effects of this discussion can be seen everywhere, from the popular deep-dive podcast Obsessed With..., Line of Duty, to Sarah Hughes’s irreplaceable column in the Guardian (the comment thread was left open following her death last month) to the thousands of users pouring onto Twitter every Sunday night to post memes about Ted Hastings’s eyebrow.
The fact that Line of Duty doesn’t patronise its audience is one of the keys to its success. Unlike a lot of TV, especially in this genre, it respects the ability of its viewers to navigate a thick, jargony kind of realism. You follow the plot as though you are one of the characters, chart-mapping every twist and googling every acronym. In other words, it provides an opportunity for intense nerds—including the one typing out this article—to speculate on what might happen next. Fan theories have created a similar snowball effect for the show’s popularity as they did for Game of Thrones. (Plus a similar downfall—and we’ll get to that too.) But rich detail doesn’t mean that it always makes robust sense.
Because this is Mercurio—he also wrote The Bodyguard, the finale of which saw Richard Madden catwalking around London in a suicide vest—the mundane specifics are interlaced with the mind-shatteringly bonkers. In season five, Steve happened to notice while rewatching a video of bent copper Dot Cottan that he was tapping out Morse Code with his fingers as he lay dying. In this season, the key to uncovering the Criminal Mastermind was a misspelling of the word “definitely.” It’s the kind of unbelievable twist that could only have been engineered by a writer, but by and large, that doesn’t matter. The cheesiness only intensifies our enjoyment. These are characters you invest in, come hell or high water. That’s why when Hastings says: “The name’s Hastings ma’am. I’m the epitome of an old battle,” he is cheered by the audience, not ridiculed. Like this wasn’t the kind of contrived line he’d been rehearsing in his head for the last 40 years.
Hughes—still the greatest critic of Line of Duty—once wrote in the Guardian that the show is really about how a split-second decision can derail a life. “Tony Gates covered up his lover’s hit and run,” she wrote. “Lindsay Denton chose to protect Carly after a chance meeting. Danny Waldron pulled the trigger when faced with a ghost from his past. And Corbett shot Hargreaves.” This hits on the way the show engages with the idea of character: how people are formed and what really defines them.
Every long-running TV series eventually develops its own philosophy as to character, because that is the engine on which TV runs. In films, and to a slightly lesser extent novels, characters can be contained within a straight-forward narrative structure. Elizabeth Bennett marries Darcy and the book ends. They have both achieved their purpose: they are now “complete” as human beings. Television is more like real life in the sense that it is designed to go on and on: there has to be space within it for people to organically develop, to go back on those developments, to struggle “within” a state rather than just trying to achieve it. It is about endurance, not attainment, and for the most part Line of Duty is about the endurance of principle. How do you stick to the good fight? How do you know which side is which? At what point does it start to not matter? Or, to paraphrase Ted: when do we stop caring about integrity?
That brings us to Buckells. OK. It’s only fair to start by saying that the conclusion to series six was always going to be somewhat unsatisfying. When you have thousands of people digging into the plot on virtually a full-time basis, it is very hard as a writer to try and satisfy even a small number of fans. Both Game of Thrones and Line of Duty fell victim to their own success in this respect. (Memes comparing pass-ag Pat Carmichael and Daenerys Targaryen are currently circulating online.) But a season finale as explosive as this one is about attainment, I’m afraid. It’s about giving the viewer a satisfying conclusion. And to land the fans with a thinly-drawn cartoon villain like Buckells, alongside precisely zero big twists in a flat, cardboard-texture episode: to be honest, it just feels cruel, Jed. I suspect there’s a plan to spin this out further to a bigger plot for series seven, and yes, I will be tuning in. But it’s hard not to disapprove of what feels (sorry) like a cop out. We suffered 10 years of tension for this? Really, Jed? For Buckells?
It’s a particular kick in the teeth for a show which usually paints its characters so deftly. Ian Buckells’s motives are uninteresting, because he has never seemed to have much integrity or complexity. Line of Duty is best when it explores the psyches of seemingly good people caught in the act of making hard decisions—at the times when the core of their complexity really comes into play. One of the tensest ever moments of the show came in episode six of this series. Kate, having been tailed by police after the death of Ryan, sees Steve among the force and thinks for a second that he is part of the conspiracy. Her hand hovers above her gun. The camera hovers above her. You see the contortion in her face—this is her moment to make a split-second decision: to forever alter the course of her life. Does she shoot? No. Course not, mate. But the drama is all in the hesitation. Perhaps one of the most frightening things about a human life is that you can never fully understand another person. You can never know exactly what is happening in their head, and subsequently whether they’re acting in your interests.
The programme spins on exactly this kind of paranoia: are those who say they’re good really the good guys? Can you even trust your friends? Can we, as an audience, trust the characters we’ve come to love? It’s faintly disappointing to see the conclusion come so flatly to the notion that—yeah, brush your suspicions aside—we probably can, at least for a bit longer, while the subplot threads dangle into the abyss. It's even more disappointing to discover that the Bad Guy is an empty-headed stooge who was unlikeable from the beginning.
But I grumble. In art as in life, the conclusion always seems anticlimactic compared to the bulk of the journey. A disappointing end shouldn’t work to eclipse the rest of the show. We have to take into account how the good the series has been in order to get us to this point. Anyway, let’s face it, the fandom is completely unhinged. Last week, someone on Twitter posted a meme with the caption: “Anyone know any pub gardens showing the Line of Duty finale on Bank holiday Sunday?” The spirit of football mania and total lack of chill that Brits do best is rife in the Line of Duty reaction, and it’s worth putting into perspective just how intense this is, how intimidating it might have been for those creating the programme. In a few weeks’ time, once things have simmered down, it will probably be easier to reflect on the good times we’ve all had. But for now, does it feel frustrating?
For the DIR: suspect is nodding.
