LINE OF DUTY: cop-on-cop action TV procedural that demands analysis

1: we don't know i'ts porn and on the whole LoD abides by chekhov's gun -- in the absence of an earlier hotel flagging of ted's cranked hog this is a made-up red herring*
*2: unless we can er enhance his laptop screen once more
3: per google, computer disposal does exist as a trade but it's usually called something like "equipment recycling"
4: i think morse is also a red herring: with his mouth dot was beginning to spell out "hang on, it's on the tips of my fingers", with his fingers he was tapping out "dot dot, dot, dot, poor dot thou art undone" and the actual message is signalled by SEMAPHORE, which judging by dot's sprawled position is an "E". possibly for EDWARD HASTINGS…

https://storage.googleapis.com/welovesailing-117.appspot.com/images/sailing-theory/sailing-communication/semaphore-flags/sailing-semaphore-signal-flag-e-echo.png

i feel the plan of "remove huggalo via a wee witch™ of a bent copper WITH A TINY KNIFE" was never going to be the flawlessly baffling crime we've come to expect from OCG

(tho i guess there aren't as many of OCG left to criminally mastermind these things)

(in ted's cranked hog terms we DID know corbett had some stuff hidden with his wife, and the idea it was a back-up recording by him of the plan he was embedded in doesn't tbh seem a total stretch?) (it's less stupid than all the dying declaration BUT IN CODE stuff)

a thing jed is good at -- or let's say consistent at -- is treating the dramatic reveal in an interview as more of a tactical pressure point than tying up the entire story in a pretty causal ribbon: the underlying truth i guess is that the police don't really usually know what happened, they rely more on psychology and bullying and traps than FACTS and LOGIC, and that anyone in the interview-room-of-infinite-reversals who can keep their nerve is not in the bad position they seem to be, especially if they themselves can still arrest and charge someone unexpected

s6: the duty soliicitor turns to the camera, gazing out at we the viewer, and puts us all away for watching this silly nonsense through six whole seasons

q1: did ted get his actual real son killed via the OCG guy in pokey? not yet clear
q2: where is the rest of the £500,000? not yet clear
q3: what was on ted's computer? (a website on how to obtain bubblewrap if yr in a hotel)

don't think John was Ted's son? he wasn't in the RUC for long enough iirc.
what 500k? Ted had 100k, kept half and presumably gave it to John's widow

was that redhead stabber just using her own initiative to get gill or had someone somewhere given the order?

Find the person signing off all the immunity agreements in exchange for no testimony of any actual use and you find H imo.

JC was his spiritual son

was that redhead stabber just using her own initiative to get gill or had someone somewhere given the order?

Oh dear. I thought that latter half of the finale was properly terrible!

Hasting's first half interview was pretty good, especially the Northern Ireland connection and his emotional breakdown at the reveal of John's true identity, but after that it went totally off the rails.

I thought Gill's 'Urgent Exit Required' was groan-inducing but then the bathroom stabbing... I burst out laughing. Let alone the morse code nonsense... mother of god, Jed! Desperately reverse engineering yet more material from an ancient scene that simply was not there before.

Funny and somewhat disheartening to see every half-decent internet fan theory coming true too... Hastings involved with John's parents, Gill as baddie, Ryan joins police etc etc.

Sir! Steve's re-examined Jed's dying declaration and spotted something we all missed.

https://i.imgur.com/tG8K04j.jpg

really need steve to pan down to dot's (strangely long and narrow) feet at this point, i think that's where the message actually is

He was trying to indicate that the real ringleaders are officers Long and Narrow!

maybe four dots is an if.... reference

This whole season felt like a penultimate episode does in a normal season- slightly unsatisfying calm before the storm of the final episode.

I wanted to go back and check this myself, but someone already did of course... Dot's dying declaration, different the two times we've seen it - notice Kate's line "first letter" vs "first two letters".

https://streamable.com/2dofm

yeah I thought I was going mad with that
why change that when they're trying to prove it WAS Hastings but showing that it's not H-A

Did Kate just flub the line and no-one noticed?

See also: Lindsay Denton's perfectly calm turning off the main road during the ambush vs shocked crazed car driving

That is confusing. Doubtless H doctored the footage to add a misleading second letter, wouldn't be surprised if there's a video editing software suite recovered from Ted's laptop. Which will also have had incriminating blobs of someone's frozen ejaculate planted on it.

Which actions on Corbett's part are explained by his having made a deal with Gill?

genuine hatred of bent coppers I guess, and 'licence' to act on it, and specifying Ted.
also perhaps why the ocg called the top police contact 'h'

that streamable link is actually making me cross now. I want someone to question Jed M about it. 'document one in your folder' style.

wait does it mean H? or that there are 4 bent senior coppers? what?? this is as much of a stretch as dumbledore's "logic" for how many horcruxes there must be out there and what they likely are. just makes it up.

i will admit i yelped when they started reading gill bigs her rights. and again when the lift doors are closing on ted and kate & steve are like "just doing our job, sir" and he replies "no, you did much more than that" GET IN

xpost I'm on Jed's side for this one! I think it's a cool move to go back and secretly shift a goalpost within one of the foundational texts of the show.

this interview with JM answers a few niggles
https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a27332344/line-of-duty-season-5-episode-6-explained-jed-mercurio/

xp it's total gaslighting and tampering with evidence!

it's pronounced hercurio

That interview is really interesting/maddening! It's like bad Dungeon Mastering - keeping all the backstory to a campaign in your head, so it always makes internal sense, but meanwhile your players are all "???".

Also not really helped by the Michael Winner-esque direction for some of this season.

sadly michelle of eastenders is to blame for the direction :(

i like to think of jed totally tampering with the evidence of our own earlier eyes as his bold stance against the fan-service hegemony in modern pop culture

I can't fathom how they'd be that slack at continuity in re-filming such a crucial scene, so it has to be deliberate. Was the file doctored within Line Of Duty world and this will feature in S6, or is it Jed M tampering with evidence for his own crappy storyline needs like kinder says?

Another question I have is with the 'definately' thing... we were led to believe that the content of the encrypted conversations couldn't be accessed by the police, just the 'metadata', yet during Carmichael's interview with Ted he states that he had previously studied H's responses on the OCG's encrypted chat and hence was able to reproduce the spelling error for authenticity when he took the role of H. Carmichael accepted this explanation. Did I miss something?

Carmichael accepted this explanation

i think this is overstating carmichael's response tbh, we know she wanted to pursue the case against ted but this was impatiently overruled

s6 shd feature a character like buffy's sister dawn -- who is suddenly just magically there as part of AC12 and everyone accepts them and forgets to remember that they weren't there in an earlier series and fails to realise they are THE KEY

line of doody

xp I guess she could have planned to come back to it (the "definately" thing) later, true. Still bugs me though.

yes I'm (again) confused by that. they seized Lisa's computer so had chat logs at that point, but I thought before that they hadn't.

surely a criminal psychologist or someone would've briefed ted in advance and would be able to confirm whether ted's mispelling was definately intentional or not

in conclusion, that's actually just how jed mercurio spells definitely

― mark s, Monday, April 22, 2019 12:32 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/5538890/Definitely-is-most-commonly-misspelt-word.html

^^^but in the box ted shd have referred to this statistic, citing the discipline of FORENSIC ORTHOGRAPHY to explain why spelling it correctly wd actually be more suspicious

Speaking of intentional mistakes, DI Brandyce is no fool and that wasn't a pointless scene inserted to confuse the viewer: she originally indicated that the search was under the legal power of section 32, even though the correct legal power was section 18(5), as a way of sending a coded message.

If only it had been Sections 10 and 66.

would've been one in the eye for H

groan

fellas

lol just put on a cbeebies bedtime story on the iplayer and the first two are Anna Maxwell Martin and Stephen Graham

'poor old Edward, sad and all alone' says John Corbett

this season should have been told from the perspective of AC-3, we have a couple of episodes of laddering + bantz and then they start to investigate *ANOTHER ANTI-CORRUPTION SQUAD*

There's only one thing I care about...

...catching bent coppers!

Don't know where else to put this, but since it's impossible to search for: has there been any talk on these boards about the 'Blood' tv series starring Adrian Dunbar? 3/4th in and it's pretty wicked. And evil.

I watched it when it was on a few months ago. It was unpleasant.

Unpleasant, that's the word. Seeing Cat being psychologically tortured (regardless of whether it turns out to be true or not) is almost getting too much. Of course the last episode I watched was her abandoning Barry just when he needed her most and then he did... Well, you know (to avoid spoilers). I'm too far in to quit now - and the acting overall is really great - but it's bordering on unbearable.

started this series last night :D

so jealous

i’m only 3 eps in and it fairly whips along! def onboard

omg VG where ya been?

hello double glazed GLAREd windows