Dereliction of Duty
With several million others I followed BBC2’s Line of Duty, from beginning to end, tied in by what I saw from episodes one to five as a brilliant, evolving plot. Too bad about episode six. Today, in common with many (most?) of them I find myself scratching my head at the conclusion, trying to join all the dots, and frustrated by an unsatisfactory ending. Too much of the motivation for the murder conspiracy was hinted at rather than spelled out. The people who were presumed to have commissioned the hit were never identified, but left nameless and faceless. The flash-back towards the end, in which much of it was almost explained, was a crude device, as if someone had wound back and then hit the fast forward button. There was a plot line that linked back to the first Line of Duty series, but was never explained in this one, making it meaningless to those who had either missed it or forgotten it. Who was ‘The Caddy’? If you didn’t know from the beginning, you were never told. If I did those things in a book, none of them would ever get past my editor. Clearly there was no such person involved in the making of this series.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I don’t do reviews. This isn’t one of those; it’s a complaint, that the BBC Drama department should have spent millions on a project that kept viewers hooked right to the end and then self-destructed by failing to answer all the questions that had been raised.
Quintin Jardine's blog 
Hi Couldn’t agree more very dissappointing after 5 very good episodes.
Just been on the Telegraph website this helps a bit, but really a series shouldn’t need to be explained after the event:-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10710528/Line-of-Duty-10-key-questions-answered.html.
Yes, I saw that, but even a couple of those answers are assumptions. There was other stuff at the end too. Why did Vicky’s husband chuck her out, and how could he? Also, Steve seemed to shag half the female cast. I’m surprised the BBC sisterhood let that pass.
Presumably Vicky’s hubby discovered at some time that she had been having an affair with Akers and Steve is rather attractive. But, no, I was as enthusiastic about the series as everyone else, but was left confused after the final episode. I like the hanging end over Cottan, paving the way for the next series, but I am still wondering what happened to the 4×4 that was Pradad and Cole used to ambush the van from which Denton escaped. Were Prasad and Cole driving that or the Audi in which they then kidnapped her? In the time it took for them to find her why did the police not arrive in answer to calls from the prison guards, who this time appeared to be straight? Who placed the tracking device on Denton’s car? So many questions, but the biggest of them all — as so many of us felt let down by the final episode will any of us be quite to enthusiastic about a third series? By the way I was one who had not seen the first series.