After an already fairly action-packed start to the series of
Line of Duty, Jed Mercurio took us up another few notches on Sunday night, delivering a downright slobberknocker of an episode. It had it all: three bent coppers put in their place, two cold-blooded murders, and one forced retirement (RIP Daddy Hastings).
And, to top it all off, he closed it out with a (somewhat shoehorned in) cliffhanger, in which Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) and Chloe Bishop (Shalome Brune-Franklin) presented Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) with a folder which disclosed a surprise discovery: the identity of a blood relation to Joanne Davidson (Kelly MacDonald). Of course, rather than just tell him aloud like real-life humans, they did the very TV thing of sliding him the folder and allowing him to open it, meaning the audience is left in the dark until the next episode. And it's clearly pretty juicy: the information contained within was shocking enough to elicit a “mother of god” from the gaffer, a good tease to leave us gagging for next Sunday to come round.