Line Of Duty
Spoilers follow.
I know I’m late to the party when it comes to the BBC’s mostly excellent police drama Line Of Duty, but I’ve spent the past two weeks binging every single season and so now I’m basically an expert. Or at least I have the entire series very fresh in my mind.
As I said, it’s mostly great which is why I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t watched yet (and if you haven’t, please read that link and stop reading this post because it spoils the ending).
Granted, I think there’s a noticeable dip in quality beginning in Season 4, when the show starts to get a tad bit more outlandish and focuses less and less on character development and more and more on moving the plot forward. There’s a pretty stark contrast between the corruption of Tony Gates (Lennie James) in Season 1 and the story of Roseanne Huntley (Thandiwe Newton) in Season 4. The first feels a lot more grounded. And even though Season 2 gets into a pretty wild assassination plot, it still feels more believable than what we get in the final three seasons.
Meanwhile, Season 5 suffers from repetitiveness. We already had a plot revolving around the framing of Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) in Season 3. The framing of Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) in Season 5 felt a bit forced.
Which brings us to Season 6, which wasn’t as bad as I feared it would be after hearing from a lot of readers, but was still far and away the worst of the bunch. Looking back, the chief problem with Season 6 was already brewing in Season 5.
And that, dear readers, is DI Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure).
Kate Fleming
How Do You Solve A Problem Like Kate Fleming?
For about four seasons, Kate Fleming was (mostly) a really great character. She was smart and tough and rarely let emotions get the better of her. But there have been aspects of Fleming’s character that have bothered me for a while now, and I think we need to time-travel back to Season 2 to see where the first crack formed.
I hated how the series showed us Kate’s family in the final episode of Season 1 and then popped her into an adulterous affair right off the bat in Season 2. For one thing, I don’t think we needed both our lead detectives to always be sleeping around. And granted, she wasn’t sleeping with anyone involved in a case at first but once she learned the man she was sleeping with was involved, she kept sleeping with him. I would have really preferred Kate to be more of a contrast to Steve in this regard. I think this was the first disservice the show and its creator Jed Mercurio did to Kate’s character, but not the last.
Despite this affair, in the first four seasons, Kate was still a mostly great character. If I had any other complaint, it would be that after Season 1 she somehow loses her undercover skills in baffling ways, coming on much too strong in Season 2 with Lindsay Denton (Keeley Hawes) and then again in Season 4 with Huntley. In Season 1 she’s at her best, and even though she comes through in Season 3, I wasn’t exactly happy with how easily Dot (Craig Parkinson) dupes her until the very end when she goes full badass.
Nevertheless, I genuinely really liked Kate and wanted more from her character. More backstory. More personal life. We get a lot more character development for both Superintendent Hastings and DS Arnott over the course of the series, and I think that’s a shame.
In Season 5, Kate is relegated almost to a side character, with the vast bulk of the drama taking place between Steve and John Corbett (Stephen Graham) or between Hastings and the investigation into whether or not he’s the mysterious “H”.
But it’s in Season 6 where Kate is good and truly betrayed by the series. Line Of Duty seems absolutely determined to ruin her character in the most inexplicably baffling ways.
- First, Kate has left AC-12 and is now on the team that AC-12 decides to investigate. When Steve informs her of this, she isn’t happy about it but let’s on that she has her doubts about how a recent arrest was botched. She even gives Steve the name of a more likely suspect.
- Then she goes to her boss and warns her that AC-12 is going to investigate them, giving her a tip that allows her to get the jump on Steve, hinder his investigation and hide crucial files in the process.
- She goes on to tell Steve that she’s tired of nicking bent coppers and wants to catch real criminals for a change, which after years on AC-12 is something nobody would say in a million years, given all the bad guys that they’ve caught up to now have been very much real criminals.
- She also says she now knows what it’s like to work with a real team, because apparently working with three of the bentest coppers in the history of the show is so much better than working with Arnott and Hastings.
- Continually, despite mountains of evidence that Jo Davidson (Kelly Macdonald) is corrupt, Kate defends her to Hastings and Arnott. Even when Davidson has come clean about her corruption, Kate (and later Steve) both go on and on about how she can prove she’s not bent. But this is the most bizarre preferential treatment ever. Davidson has been manipulated into helping the OCG, but so was Gates and so was Denton and so was Dot to some degree. Are they all not corrupt because they were blackmailed or intimidated into helping organized crime?
Ryan
The Single Worst Sequence In Line Of Duty
All of this culminates into one of the most bizarre and infuriating segments I’ve ever seen in a TV show. First, Davidson—on orders to kill Kate—lures her to a very suspicious parking lot that has “We’re going to murder you” written all over it. Kate doesn’t bother calling for backup or checking on surveillance until after she arrives. This is despite the fact that she’s clearly suspicious, having brought and double-checked her gun.
When she’s about to leave, Davidson’s car pulls in and Kate gets out of hers without any regard for her own safety, even though she knows that Ryan Pilkington (Gregory Piper) could be nearby and that she’s in danger. When Ryan pops out of the car and Davidson is saying “I’m so sorry, Kate” she still fails to draw her firearm, despite every reason to do so. Then, when he draws his, instead of putting him down on the spot, she keeps telling him to drop his weapon. When shots are fired, the screen cuts to black, clearly in a desperate attempt to drive viewership numbers the following week.
And it gets worse. When the next episode begins, we don’t see what happened in real-time. We only see when the other cops show up and find Ryan’s body. Kate and Jo are gone and my first assumption was that Kate had also been shot and Davidson had absconded with her. (What a waste of Ryan, also, who deserved a much better ending).
Instead, we learn that the two women are on the run . . . for reasons. Despite Kate having informed Steve of the location and asked him to come, she’s now run off with the chief suspect and looks guiltier than sin. She takes Steve’s car from his flat and they drive off to do . . . stuff? I guess Davidson is going to tell Kate the truth or something? She wants to prove she’s “not bent” despite, well, the myriad pieces of evidence that say otherwise. When the cops show up, Kate panics and says they’re being framed.
Drop the damn gun, Kate.
Framed? Framed for what? The shooting of Ryan was perfectly lawful, and had they remained at the scene Kate would have quickly been exonerated. The evidence against Ryan was overwhelming. Every fact pointed toward Kate being lured to her death. Instead, Davidson says she’ll tell the police that she shot Ryan, and later after they’re arrested, she does just that. But why? Kate did nothing wrong, and lying about it is a much more serious offense than explaining a lawful use of lethal force.
From here we get an admittedly fun—but pointless—car chase. Kate drives like James Bond, cranking out wicked turns with the hand-brake. But they’re trapped and they reluctantly get out of the car. When Kate sees Arnott she utters the single dumbest line in the entire series: “Steve’s in on it too!” she exclaims, as though her police partner showing up at the scene proves that he’s part of some conspiracy.
Davidson sensibly drops her pistol on the ground but Kate, surrounded by dozens of police, refuses to do so and refuses to put her hands up in what must be the most excruciating moments of stupidity and character assassination I’ve seen since Game Of Thrones. Is she thinking of blasting her way out of there? Does she want to commit suicide-by-cop? Why would she want to do either one of these things all of a sudden, when she’s done nothing wrong whatsoever? This is not Kate Fleming! This is not how the smart, sober-minded detective of the first five seasons would behave.
Of course, at this point it’s clear that she’s been written into the corner all season. Her stupid blindness to Davidson makes no sense. Her bizarre loyalty to Davidson’s unit despite all evidence to the contrary makes no sense. Toss in some bizarre queer-baiting with Fleming and Davidson’s “will they won’t they?” relationship and you get one of the most dreadful character screwups I’ve ever seen.
Buckkells
The Fourth Man
A lot of people were upset by the final big reveal at the end of Season 6, when it turns out that the bumbling Buckells (Nigel Boyle) is actually “H”. I didn’t hate that, personally. I thought it was a surprising twist—Buckells is the Butters of Line Of Duty, so the reveal felt a bit like Dr. Chaos—and it was certainly thought-provoking. Hastings talks about how people mistake incompetence for corruption, and that’s pretty interesting to me.
But I will say, it feels like something was left hanging at the end. Like there really needs to be one more season and one more Big Bad for this show to really work, even if a Big Bad feels a bit neat and tidy. There was a natural arc pointing toward Osborne (Owen Teale) given that his clash with Arnott in the very first episode propelled everything that was to come, and he was clearly corrupt from the outset. That he’s not a part of this—after trying so hard to shut down AC-12—makes little sense. (Even if Osborne’s corruption is simply because he believes you have to lie sometimes to get the job done and not that he was part of the OCG, I still think he needs a reckoning and Arnott needs to be the one to bring him down).
The other problem with Season 6 is just how neatly everything fits. There’s a lack of friction to the case. We’re introduced to Steve’s new partner, Chloe (Shalom Brune-Franklin) and while I liked her and the actor did a good job, she was basically never given a personality. She also functioned essentially like Peter Prior in True Detective: Night Country. All the detective work in the season is basically just her searching the database for stuff and later expositing to Steve about what she finds. Not a particularly exciting way to go about solving the show’s final mystery.
If there is a Season 7, I hope they remember a few things. First, Kate is not an idiot and deserves both a better arc for her character and as much emotional depth as the other leads. Second, this show thrives on the balance between action and solid detective work. If we are going to tackle Osborne—and we should!—have our lead detectives do actual work to solve the case. Third, this is a character-driven show. You have to give speaking parts actual personalities. And finally, you’ll need Hastings in some capacity (maybe have him working for another agency now, like the Home Office’s Independent Office For Police Conduct or IOPC) because Line Of Duty just wouldn’t be the same without the gaffer.
