Time's Up:Line of Duty S6.

"The secret to high office appears no longer to reside in revealing the deepest truths but in telling the most attractive lies" - Gail Vella

"What has happened to us? When did we stop caring about honesty and integrity?" - Superintendent Ted Hastings

The sixth, and possibly final, series of Line of Duty (BBC1/iPlayer) was the most watched of them all but according to social media, the world's one stop shop for griping and telling other people that the things they like are - in fact - shit, it ended on a bit of a bum note. That's not I line of thought I agree with. The last episode may not have been the best episode but it didn't need to be. If you can watch thirty five hours of television, enjoy it and be fully gripped and emotionally invested, it seems a bit harsh to complain that the last hour, or even the last fifteen minutes, disappointed.

Yes, there were one or two ends left untied (suggesting a seventh series is a possibility, if a remote one) but I was still enthralled to the very end - 'reverse ferret' or not. An investigative journalist, Gail Vella (Andi Osho), has been murdered and DCI Joanne Davidson (Kelly Macdonald) is heading up a team to investigate that murder.

Davidson's working under DSU Ian Buckells (Nigel Boyle) and Buckells seems angrier, and more hot headed, than last time we met him (at one point raging "this is bollocks, total bastard bollocks") if still as incompetent as ever. Failing upwards you might say.

Davidson's team includes PC Farida Jatri (Anneika Rose) and DS Chris Lomax (Perry Fitzpatrick) as well as DI Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) who has left AC-12 (and is estranged from her husband - again), slightly disillusioned by the job and keen to move on in her career. Over at AC-12, DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) has a new partner, the young and capable DC Chloe Bishop (Shalom Brune-Franklin), but is also looking at moving away from anti-corruption.

While, at the same time, dosing up on Ibuprofen (and stronger) for the painful back problems he received being thrown down a stairwell in the fourth series. His love life, too, remains interesting. There are flirtations, again, with DS Nicola Rogerson (Christina Chong) and, in Liverpool, with John Corbett's widow Steph (Amy de Bhrun), a will-they-won't-they situation is being intensely played out.

When Davidson receives a lead relating to Vella's murder, neither she nor others involved in the case, seem in any great urgency to follow it up and it looks to all concerned that Terry Boyle (Tommy Jessop), a man with severe learning difficulties who has been abused and exploited by organised crime gang members before, is being framed for the murder.

Jatri reports her concerns to Arnott and soon AC-12 are taking an interest in both Davidson's behaviour and the Vella case. Which leads us, of course - this is Line of Duty, into a world of CHISs, appropriate adults, CCTV, malfeasance, sadistic screws, rather appealing looking witness protection programmes, and, that Line of Duty staple, cop facing off against cop. Either across a meeting table or, in some instances, somewhere far more dangerous.

When Jatri is removed from Davidson's team at her own request, she is replaced by PC Ryan Pilkington (Gregory Piper) who we, the audience, have know from the get go has been involved in very high end organised criminal activity. To put it succinctly, he's a wrong 'un through and through. But is he a 'bad apple' or is he symptomatic of institutionalised corruption within the police force.

This is the point that Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) battles out with his old sparring partner DCS Patricia Carmichael (Anna Maxwell Martin) time and time again. Carmichael is business like, ruthless, efficient, and kowtows to nobody - except those higher up the food chain than her. She is, as she says, nothing if not pragmatic, and when Chief Constable Phillip Osborne (Owen Teale) appears on television spouting populist bullshit about the "enemies within" the police force (and he's not talking about bent coppers), Carmichael takes that as if an order.

Hastings despairs of Carmichael's handbook adherence but, even more so, knows Osborne is lying. Which, of course, provides him with some great excuses to let that left eye of his get to work at out acting everyone else. It also provides him with some wonderful Hastingsisms, "Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the wee donkey" being the most famous. But it was also rather wonderful when, in response to DCC Andrea Wise (Elizabeth Rider) and her request that he moves on from fighting old battles, he deadpanned "the name's Hastings, ma'am - I'm the epitome of an old battle".

The character of Hastings, his strengths and his vulnerabilities as well as his way with a pithy bon mot and an exasperated put down, has been one of Line of Duty's greatest strengths from the off. As has the ever more tender, despite testing moments, and incredibly touching friendship between Arnott and Fleming. Elsewhere, much of the success throughout the six series came from the fact that the drama is never, or rarely, played out between the wholly virtuous and the irredeemably evil.

The wide chasm between those two extremes, let's call it humanity in all its complexity, has always been the most fertile area for dramatic tension and creator and writer Jed Mercurio (this time with Daniel Nettheim, Gareth Bryn, and Jennie Darnell on board for directing duties) has what seems like an almost superhuman skill at weaving these human frailties and foibles into television gold. Judicious decisions about what to tell the viewers, and when, serves to constantly heighten the tension and the sense of intrigue.

As ever, you could tie yourself in knots trying to interpret every lingering glance through a Venetian blind or furtive stare from a mezzanine floor and for that we must credit each and every member of the cast. Series six saw the return of Ace Bhatti as PC Rohan Sindwhani and Patrick Baladi as Jimmy Lakewell, while introducing new characters like Haran Nadaraja (Prasanna Puwanarajah), DS Marks (Kwako Fortune), and the retired DI Marcus Thurwell (a presumably intentionally under used James Nesbitt) but, notwithstanding the quality of the more noted guest stars (Keeley Hawes, Kelly Macdonald, and Stephen Graham) and the more regular bit part players, it is McClure, Compston, and Dunbar who deserve the most praise.

A sense of rupture and disillusionment has permeated the old gang, unsurprisingly after all they've witnessed, but they have each other's backs when they need to and as series six rushed towards its supposedly disappointing denouement there was a sense of a race against time, a sense even of running out of time, for Arnott, Fleming, and, more than any of them, Hastings.

As with David Simon's American masterpiece The Wire (surely a huge influence on Mercurio?), Line of Duty was never afraid to punctuate car chases and heists with lengthy, dialogue heavy, office scenes and it was never shy of punching upwards when necessary. On this, it is possible series six was the bravest of them all. From Gail Vella's and Hastings' quotes about the debasement of truth and integrity in public life to the nods to the real life racist murders of Stephen Lawrence and Anthony Walker, it felt like, this time, Mercurio was getting righteous, political, on us.

Which would be proper and correct. At a time when real life public servants, including the very highest in the UK, have allowed public standards to fall to the lowest point I have ever witnessed it is timely to create drama about that very situation and how that impacts on, and ruins, people's lives. Line of Duty, of course, is fictional but one last way in which Line of Duty worked so well for so many millions of us was that it always felt like it could be very real. That somehow it reflected both the complexity of doing the right thing and how that complexity can be exploited by those with low morals to empower or enrich themselves. 

Was I disappointed by the final series of Line of Duty? No, not at all. Did I think that all six series were utterly fantastic. Yes, definAtely.