H Bomb:Line of Duty S5.

"That's the problem with corruption enquiries. There's always the danger you'll find some" - Gill Biggeloe.

When AC-12 are asked to investigate a deadly hijack of a police convoy resulting in the interception and theft of a large amount of heroin on its way to be incinerated we, the regular viewers, know that will be just the beginning of the story.

Series 5 of Line of Duty (BBC1/iPlayer - originally aired in March/April/May 2019), remarkably, ups the ante on the four previous seasons when Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar), DI Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), and DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) find themselves stumbling into a major, and highly confidential, undercover operation headed up by DS John Corbett (Stephen Graham).

Corbett, it appears, has either gone rogue or gone native (and Graham, of course, is an absolute master when it comes to playing men with troubled pasts dealing with their demons, he gives very good furrowed brow) and his introduction to the ongoing story of AC-12's mission to rid the police force of corrupt officers, and this seems almost beyond belief, manages to sew yet more confusion and obfuscation, intentionally, in the viewer's mind.

While, at the same time - and this shows just how clever the writing of Jed Mercurio and the direction of John Strickland and Sue Tully (yes, Michelle Fowler from Eastenders/Suzanne Ross from Grange Hill) is, ever so slowly enlightening us as to the true intentions of many of the people we have got to know over nearly an entire day's viewing of Line of Duty!

They're not all who you think they are. Corbett has won the trust of, and infiltrated, an organised crime group and is working with, or against, Lisa McQueen (Rochenda Sandall), Miroslav Minkowicz (Tomi May), and, hasn't he grown?, Ryan Pilkington (Gregory Piper) in a world of nightclubs, cocaine, gambling debts, automatic weapons, cliched biker gangs, black Range Rovers, and sex trafficking young women. 

 

 

Young women that are, charmlessly, referred to as 'livestock'. AC-12 are in a world of prison visits, telephone boxes coated with sex worker call cards, ANPR, exsanguination, Jiffy Bags stuffed with £50 notes, multiple TLAs (as ever), and gaslighting but they've been there before. What's new is that this time the suspicions are falling closer to home than ever before.

For the first time in Line of Duty, we see police being recruited, blackmailed, or forced by circumstance into the criminal underworld. We get a clearer picture of how the various facets of this criminal underworld join up. How arms, drugs, extortion, and prostitution are all linked and when a paramilitary style punishment is carried out, we see that there is a hitherto unexplored link to the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the seventies and eighties.

Where Hastings, as a young man, had served. Still separated from his wife, he's now staying in a Premier Inn/Travelodge style hotel and he's still tempted by the advances of his lawyer friend Gill Biggeloe (Polly Walker). Arnott, still dapper and now bearded, is dipping his toes in the water of online dating while still carrying a torch for his ex, DS Sam Railston (Aiysha Hart), and still in pain from the injuries he received being thrown down a stairwell. Him and Fleming appear to be outgrowing Hastings, "the gaffer", and thinking even more for themselves.

As the search for the elusive H continues, and the quest to prove that there is institutionalised corruption within the police force - not just a few 'bad apples', there are, of course, more tragic, violent, and unnecessary deaths. There is more skulking around in dark alleys, dark flats, and dark hotel rooms and there are times when characters find themselves in seemingly unrecoverable situations only to be saved by Mercurio's mercurial writing or, sometimes, a rather too handy deus ex machina which resolves short term peril, often violently, but, in the long term, leaves important questions and implications to be answered another day.

 

Which is great. It's one of the secrets of Line of Duty's huge success. As is it's ever evolving list of characters. None of them wasted. None of them brought in, or removed, for any other reason than to propel the story forward. In series five we're reacquainted with PC Maneet Bindra (Maya Sondhi) and DCS Lester Hargreaves (Tony Pitts) and we're introduced to new characters like PC Tatleen Sohota (Taj Atwal), Rosa Escoda (Amanda Yao), DCC Andrea Wise (Elizabeth Rider), Mark Moffatt (Patrick FitzSymons), PCC Rohan Sindwhani (Ace Bhatti), Vihaan Malhotra (Maanuv Thiara), Sergeant Jane Cafferty (Sian Reese-Williams), Steph Corbett, John's wife (Amy De Bhrun), and DSU Alison Powell (Susan Vidler).

It's a lot of names, and faces, to remember (I sometimes had to pause and look them up as if carrying out my own private investigation) but each and every one of them is relevant to the propulsion of the story line and each and every one of them puts in a great performance. There is never any slack when it comes to Line of Duty.

One new character is introduced you won't need to look up. DCS Patricia Carmichael (Anna Maxwell Martin in a role that could hardly be further away than the character she plays in Motherland) is brought in, along with her officers DI Michelle Brandyce (Laura Elphinstone) and PS Tina Tranter (Natalie Gavin) to investigate members of AC-12 themselves and she is thorough, merciless, and utterly determined.

Maxwell Martin plays her brilliantly but, as ever, nobody can quite compete with Dunbar. It's hard to keep your eyes off him as he spars with various opponents both in and out of the office. He's even more compelling when events from his past come back to haunt him. He's the heart of a drama whose tentacle grip reaches out ever further in every direction as we wait, enthralled, for all these disparate strands to be neatly, or - more likely - very messily, tied up.

As the architecture of the story becomes ever more baroque we are unsure how to interpret even the most simple of gestures. When somebody leans back in their chair is that lean one of guilt, one intended to feign guilt, or one of celebration? Is a misspelt word intentional, is it an honest mistake, or is it a clue to a person's identity?

There are several moments in Line of Duty that genuinely chill the bone. The score hits a power chord when an H bomb is dropped, there's an impromptu medical visit that has dark ulterior motives, there's an eerie bedtime story of Chicken Licken read to children still unaware their father has been murdered, and there's an opening scene which involves a particularly imaginative and horrific act of duplicity. 

There is sadness too, the look on a man's face when his wife of several decades tells him she's met someone else is heartbreaking, but it is for the unsettling revelations and the complex yet taut plot, now as labyrinthine as one of the maps that adorns the walls of an AC-12 interview room, that we keep returning. One more series to go. Now we're sucking diesel.