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

the over-egging of hastings' coming doom, the blizzard of possibly false hints that he's a wrong un too, has kind of become a black box they can get anything out of and we won't be surprised (which means we'll be a bit disappointed either way)

― mark s, Monday, 15 April 2019 10:17 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^

Steve is a hottie! There's no ambiguity.

xpost i'm getting a "last chance saloon" vibe from ted's overuse of the catchphrases this season

john stalker reminds me of how i was too young to have been alive (or was a baby) when he was in the public eye for his policing and so i just knew him as the guy in the awning advert

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZzeeAMtIVQ

wonder if that was his final awning

The sheer preponderance of closed loops and callbacks and every character getting a bit of an action scene and Ted told to retire feels extremely This Is The Last Season to me

this is what they want me to think ofc

who is going to turn out not to be dead after all?

tommy hunter
john corbett
DENTON <-- i want this but im not going to get it i know
jackie laverty

DOT COTTAN

I rewatched this because I’m mental and also because my wife hadn’t seen it.

I liked how the chief constable characterized quashing AC-12’s corruption investigations as “taking back control”.

Here’s something. When Jo Davidson is In The Chat with the person we presume is H, H says AC-12 got two of their men killed. Jo was like yeah, good ol’ Lewis. H replies, it was Fleming. Now, how on earth could H know that it was Kate who tipped AC-12 off about the workshops? The only person Kate told about that was Jo, when Jo confronted her.

i thought it was more that Kate was causing trouble in general - potentially recognising Ryan, and being an old ac12 adversary to boot

Maybe so, but it seemed explicitly connected to the deaths in the workshop. Like this was the final straw and Kate needed to pay. It seems like only someone in AC-12 could have known that Kate was the source of the info on the workshop.

H-ate ? 😬 🤯

dont this-makes-no-sense me, you DOT-DOT-DOT-DOT-swallowing chumps

I rewatched this because I’m mental and also because my wife hadn’t seen it.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTaTATDUJ2sn2s06GoiN15eETpnvNSZK1lSZw&usqp=CAU

One of the things I love about LoD is how the memes overlap with other programmes now.

trishyb if that picture is any indication you have apparently authorised intrusive surveillance of my house

My favourite bonkers theory is that because Jimmy Lakewell told Steve to look into the 'race claim' - when you add H to that you get an anagram of Carmichael.

If this was Russel Davies I could see it, but I'm not convinced.

The sheer preponderance of closed loops and callbacks and every character getting a bit of an action scene and Ted told to retire feels extremely This Is The Last Season to me

this is what they want me to think ofc

While at the same time Adrian Dunbar is doing press and dropping hints about S7 (it's what they want you to think).

https://metro.co.uk/2021/02/23/line-of-dutys-jed-mercurio-hints-at-more-episodes-after-series-6-14134508/

Mercurio says he expects there to be more beyond S6, but this may just be what he wants you to think.

That RT interview upthread was inconclusive:

In our previous interviews, Mercurio explained that securing a two-series commission was essential; if only one was guaranteed, he told me, he would wrap up the entire storyline, rather than risk it being cut short. So – without going the full Ted Hastings on him – either Mercurio knew the sixth was the last series or he has abandoned his rule of always plotting two series ahead. Which is it?

“Yes,” he replies enigmatically, before elaborating: “That was part of the conversation with the BBC. We’re in a situation where it’s not entirely clear that there will be a seventh series. We would hope there could be. But we’re having to do our planning coming out of COVID, and a whole bunch of other things around the idea that these things aren’t guaranteed at all now.”

Interviewing dramatists is often tricky, as they have a natural understanding of the rhythms and tactics of dialogue. But Mercurio is an especially challenging conversationalist, as his signature interrogation scenes show a highly sophisticated sense of the flow of information and misinformation. Tempted to borrow Hastings’s trademark exclamation of frustration, “Give me strength!”, I have another go.

This time, then, Mercurio hasn’t stuck to his rule that, if he wasn’t sure there would be a next series, he would wrap it up in the one he was writing? “I haven’t necessarily been true to that,” he says. “I think the indications are that the BBC remains very supportive. So, without a formal commission, I would say conversations have been very reassuring from the standpoint of not having to wrap things up.”

(That's all quoted text btw)

lol

horcruxio call him by his name

For anyone with Alexa, ask it "Who is H?"

Bit underwhelming. It feels like there was a romance plot between Kate and Jo that got subtracted somewhere in the script stage. Looking back it’s like... what actually happened? Did we learn anything we didn’t know before? Apart from the fact we probably won’t be seeing James Nesbitt any time soon?

Loved the Hastings Raised Eyebrow of Respect when Jo started quoting law regulations

Finding a flyblown corpse in this show doesn't quite convince me Thurwell's definitely dead xp

He's clearly not dead.

I'm not 100% clear on why Kate ran. Was she not supposed to have a weapon?

Bit underwhelming. It feels like there was a romance plot between Kate and Jo that got subtracted somewhere in the script stage. Looking back it’s like... what actually happened? Did we learn anything we didn’t know before? Apart from the fact we probably won’t be seeing James Nesbitt any time soon?

Initially I thought they were going off to do some in-real-time DETECTING which would be impossible if they were gummed up with explaining how they killed Ryan. Kate's reluctance to give up her gun would suggest she thought she was in imminent danger of being shot by bent coppers?

It seems weird that the series would be extended to seven episodes and then spend this whole episode on not really moving things forward materially - unless the point was to slow everything down and make it feel as though they're going to run out of time. (xp with gyac, exactly).

I appreciated a long interrogation scene, it’s clearly been done to ratchet up the tension between Carmichael and the rest of the gang even more, Ted seemed like a man with increasingly little tolerance left so interested to see where that goes for the finale. Ofc his police pension is at risk but he’s never shied away from doing the right thing even if it would cost him personally.

you just know she had the time of her life with these lines. the crew must have been howling after each take, egging her on

it was worth watching just for "Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wee donkey" alone!

that was a blatant crowd-pleaser but still...

If ‘as per my last email’ was a person #LineofDuty pic.twitter.com/Kyq1gW3Tid

— Becca 💐 (@Beccaakeen) April 25, 2021

what an exceptional villain she is though, her every facial expression is full of haughty contempt and pure hatred - almost a perfect politician.

gonna tell my grandkids she was Rachel Reeves

So what do we reckon they'll find beneath the floor of the printing shop?

It was the gun workshop, wasn’t it? Fuck knows but Jackie Laverty has to be a possibility.

Funny that Carmichael didn’t even flinch when Ted basically accused the chief constable of being H.

The other possibility is that she thinks he’s gone cuckoo over this multi-tentacled conspiracy theory, like pretty much everyone else, so nothing surprises her.

Yeah, either she is bent AF or she is convinced that Ted has lost it completely and is just trying to hold things together until she can run out the clock on him. I absolutely love how she cuts through his blustering by getting quieter and crisper instead of getting louder herself. She is factory-designed to drive Ted nuts.

We did at least learn this week that Jo is fundamentally not bent, even though she is in league with the OCG. We also learned that it's not neighbours who keep giving all this valuable forensic evidence, but the national ballistics intelligence service, Trish, you absolute fool.

Disappointingly flat end to the Ryan arc, his stint as a bent copper barely amounted to anything did it?

I also would like to call bullshit on the Spanish cops immediately identifying Jimmy Bloodlands from a decomposed corpse, that's a matter for forensics to determine, surely.

I was hoping we'd get an entire episode devoted to Kate and Jo on the run, was just starting to think "Ooh, this could get interesting" and then they just gave up. Meh.

Did anyone spot the blatantly misleading blurb on BBC Iplayer - "AC-12 struggle to come to terms with tragic events"? Yes, everyone was right cut-up over Ryan I can tell you.

Ted being forced into early retirement is pretty tragic

The ratings for this thing surely demand a seventh series

#LineOfDuty reached its highest ever overnight audience of 11 million for the penultimate episode of series six on @BBCOne, with a 51.7% audience share.

Don't miss the finale this Sunday at 9pm and watch the series so far on @BBCiPlayer: https://t.co/n6PGOM8WFP pic.twitter.com/luO7OdXFWX

— BBC Press Office (@bbcpress) April 26, 2021

Disappointingly flat end to the Ryan arc, his stint as a bent copper barely amounted to anything did it?

Yeah this was sort of a shame. He's such a little toad it would've been good (but I guess impossible) to keep him as a character for a bit longer.

It was a bit of a weird ep, wasn't it? Good to get a lot of things confirmed (even if they made no sense, e.g. Why would Davidson arrange a phony betting shop holdup when she'd also arranged the wrong surveillance and it'd already been delayed from the night before??).
Guessing Thurwell was the 'dad' figure. Hope those prison guards don't get to her.

those prison guards make me laugh. like they’ve literally been running OCG ordered kickings with maximum sadism for some time now. just wandering around the prison fucking up rats or potential rats. happy as larks.

Perhaps the people most happy in their line of work, y/n?

definately