Warning: this article contains spoilers
At a time when TV drama seemed to be going the way of the box set – whole series consumed in one go, at a time of the viewers’ choosing – Line of Duty has shown the power of an older way of watching television.
The conspiracy thriller about a police anti-corruption unit, which reached the end of its agonisingly gripping latest series on Sunday, offers what might be called a locked-box set of episodes. On six successive Sundays, writer Jed Mercurio winds up the plot to a climax leaving the audience desperate to know what happens next, then makes them wait a whole week before letting one solution out of the box and locking in another confusion. With a box set, the viewer is in control of pace and revelation; in Line of Duty, the author and the broadcaster are.
The show has built its success on storylines of astonishing convolution (some plot strands have stretched across four seasons and remain unresolved), corkscrew-twisty suspect interview scenes that can run for more than 20 minutes, and an unusually cavalier attitude to guest stars. Having so far killed off actors as distinguished as Lennie James, Keeley Hawes, Jason Watkins and Daniel Mays (the latter two lasting one episode each), Line of Duty refuses TV fiction’s usual reassurance that a familiar face will stay for the duration.
About 10 million viewers of BBC1 – where the show was promoted this year after becoming BBC2’s most popular drama – have been desperate since 26 March to know the identity of “Balaclava Man”, an obscure assassin implicated in the apparent attempt of DCI Roz Huntley, played by Thandie Newton, to frame an innocent, vulnerable young man and her own husband for a series of murders and perversions of justice being investigated by the internal affairs unit, AC-12.
The tendency of detectives to stress the second word in “Balaclava Man” had raised suspicion that Mercurio was misdirecting viewers from the fact that the woolly hat disguised a woman, possibly Huntley. But he proved to be obscuring that we were seeing balaclava men: several killers involved in a far-reaching scheme in which Newton’s character was just a pawn.
Mercurio, a former doctor, began his TV-writing career with hospital dramas (including Cardiac Arrest and Bodies) but has continued to draw on specialist medical knowledge in his police fiction. The latest series of Line of Duty has sometimes felt like an experiment in merging the cop and doc genres that dominate British TV. Key characters suffered amputation and paralysis, and surely only Dr Mercurio could have contrived this season’s payoff in which the solution to a crime lay in the superbug MRSA being present in nostrils and transferable to another person through a wound.
But, whereas a doctor’s job is to reduce the possibility of complications, Mercurio’s speciality as a writer is maximising them. Last Sunday’s penultimate episode had revealed that the senior police officer running a network of murderously corrupt police officers began with H.
Typically of the series, this initial fitted three top cops: Newton’s Roz Huntley, the assistant commissioner, Hilton (Paul Higgins) and – a solution unthinkable to most viewers – AC-12’s own chief, Supt Ted Hastings, hitherto a figure of absolute integrity who has turned the Northern Irish actor Adrian Dunbar, long admired on stage and screen, into a front-rank TV star at the age of 58.
With three H-officers in the frame, Mercurio then casually reintroduced, early in last night’s episode, DCS Peter Hargreaves. Ultimately, a cutaway of the whiteboard in AC-12’s office revealed that nine senior officers starting with the eighth letter of the alphabet had featured across the four series.
Although Hastings declared himself last night to be “confident that Hilton was H”, he has been wrong before and the quantity of suspects means that the conspiracy will take a long time to unravel, which is good news for viewers hoping for six hours of top-class television to remain an annual feature far into the future.
In a recent Guardian interview, Mercurio admitted that he had never willingly brought one of his TV shows to an end, and, with next year’s fifth season of Line of Duty already in production, he clearly has ideas for taking the series much further. A line in Sunday’s final scene about AC-12 having so far identified only the top conspirators “in the police” suggests that the web stretches into other areas of public life: perhaps politics, the army, or the security services.
The last words given to Hastings in series four – “This is beginning to feel like a life’s work” – seemed to suggest that the key may lie in decades of which viewers know nothing yet, when Hastings was one of the few Catholic officers in the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Belfast during the Troubles, when, it may or may not be significant, balaclavas were standard paramilitary dress. The verbal and facial resonances that Dunbar might bring to such twists will already have fans hoping that the show can become a life’s viewing.
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