Oh Steve, I feel your angst – there you are doing the solid, dogged cop work and no one will listen. Photograph: BBCĪnother terrible week for our friends in AC-12, with poor Steve almost weeping with frustration as he realised the extent to which he’s being set up. They have to make sure the ultimate reveal doesn’t edge into Ernst Stavro Blofeld territory.Ī desperately tense showdown … Lindsay Denton. Its strength lies in the idea that the corruption is both dramatic and the right side of believable. So then who is it? If I have one criticism it’s that Line of Duty risks painting itself in a corner over this. More plausibly, someone has told her to make this go away and like a good functionary she has. She obviously doctored the file and is involved in the coverup but I don’t think she knows Dot is the caddy. He’s just a more senior version of Dot – a guy who can make murders become suicides and hush up unfortunate allegations. Yet I don’t think the creepily avuncular Pat Fairbank is in charge either. The real question, however, remains: just who is pulling Dot’s strings? As Lindsay pointed out he’s the go-between, the bagman, the guy who makes the mess go away. Alas, poor Lindsay, you and your fringe will be deeply missed (although possibly not by Steve Arnott, who you continued to runs rings around right to the end). The scene between the two of them was the high point of this superbly tense episode, allowing me to hope that Lindsay, that great survivor, just might manage to get out of the car alive. The switched number plates suggest that he’d always intended to murder her and thus place the final nail in Steve’s coffin – will he get away with it? Despite Denton’s confident statements about ground zero DNA and her sending of the email to Hastings, I can’t help thinking he just might. Our man of many mobile phones spent the hour continuing to manipulate all around him – I was particularly impressed with the way he dripped sweet poison into Kate’s ears – before ending up in a desperately tense showdown with Lindsay Denton. Photograph: BBCįor all its sense of verisimilitude Line of Duty is at heart still a drama and thus our main focus of villainy remains the increasingly desperate Dot. Gratuitous? A doctored picture of modern-day monster Jimmy Savile with Dale Roach and Pat Fairbank. As anyone who has read In Plain Sight, Dan Davies’ brutal but important book on the subject, can tell you, it would be almost impossible for a historic scandal of the kind described not to have some sort of connection with the man. Thus I don’t think it was gratuitous to have that doctored picture of Savile in the mix.
Similarly, Line of Duty is at its best when the real world intrudes that’s what grounds it and makes us think that this could all really happen. I’ve mentioned before that it resembles a really great crime novel – and most great crime novels draw their power from the way they reflect current society. The key to Line of Duty is that it exists in a world that, while fictional, should feel exactly like ours.
Along the way, writer Jed Mercurio landed a few swift jabs at both Operation Yewtree (“how much money are we going to spend chasing clapped out DJs?”) and celebrity culture (“we all know showbiz people have very low morals”) and even audaciously evoked that infamous modern-day monster Jimmy Savile in a scene that was queasy but, I would argue, essential to the way this drama presents itself. Is it just me who would watch them in a snark-filled spin-off where they stride through bleak landscapes being chippy with each other? Meanwhile, Dot drew Kate ever further into his cosy web of expert lies and poor old Hastings found himself on the wrong end of Gill’s attentions. T hings kicked up another level again this week, as Steve found himself suspended, under investigation, covertly watched and (briefly) forced into a partnership with Lindsay Denton.
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