LINE OF DUTY SEASON 4 EPISODE 1 TV REVIEW/RECAP

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Sunday, 9pm, BBC1

A disappointingly pedestrian return for everyone’s favourite anti-corrupt British cop show.

After a bullet-speeding, spectacular foot chase of a finale to last year’s explosive third season which often veered away from plausibility in favour of crowd-pleasing telly entertainment, it’s significant then that Jed Mercurio’s award-winning Police drama significantly downsizes for its fourth 6-episode instalment of deceit, lies and corruption at the heart of the British Police force.

That is despite a budget-busting leap to the primetime 9pm Sunday night slot of BBC1 and arguably the series’ most high-profile lead in the form of ‘Westworld’ (2016-) / ’Mission Impossible II’ (2000) star Thandie Newton - following in the wake of Lennie James, Keeley Hawes and Daniel Mays as this season’s troubled, potentially bent copper under a scrutinising investigation from our zealous Irishman, impulsively naïve Mockney/Cockney copper and over curious Nottingham-born policing mum of a trio that make up AC-12.

It’s a tragic shame therefore that this opening episode largely leaves a sobering impression of more of the same. Ever since it debuted on BBC2 back in 2012, telly addicts have become well-attuned to ‘Line of Duty’s ultra-realistic portrait of Policing as being grounded and gruelling with moral dilemmas and grey areas far more in line with the Baltimore-set docudrama grit of HBO’s ‘The Wire’ (2002-2008) across the Atlantic than anything to come out of the BBC’s trashy, case-of the-week, ‘Silent Witness’-style procedurals.

The show’s magnetically unknowable second season - which grappled for 6 weeks with the guilty or not loyalties of Keeley Hawe’s unpredictably unhinged DI Lindsay Denton and her suspected involvement in car-blazingly violent Police ambush – particularly hit the highest notes with it’s ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’-like tapestry of complex, untrustworthily ambiguous characters capturing the imaginations of over 6.5 million viewers and establishing Jed Mercurio as one of the most thought-provoking and socially relevant writers working in Television today.

With the altogether flashier, more ridiculous Season 3 having rounded off with a near-perfect culmination of the series’ ongoing cat and mouse saga involving the deliciously devious DI Matt “The Caddy” Cotton (Craig Parkinson), Season 4’s opener returns the series to its urban realist roots with a satisfyingly grisly prologue involving the viciously nasty kidnapping of a twentysomething Eastern European-sounding female by a balaclava-masked figure – combined with the scorching council estate fire and frenetic arrest of a surprisingly timid hoodlum suspected to be behind terrorizing the run-down neighbourhood in a sickening series of sexually-motivated murders.

The set-piece was terrific Mercurio material. Exhausting, grim and – most of all – unflinchingly real with its Paul Greengrass/’Jason Bourne’-like “shaky cam” filming techniques pulsatingly conveying a dizzying sense of day-to-day constable work.
Of course seeing over all this was Ms. Newton’s DCI Roz Huntley – a glamorously successful detective who appears to share some of DI Denton’s disregard of officers with opposing views yet far more popular with her immediate superiors and a seemingly devoted family woman in an undeniably similar vein to Season 1’s DCI Tony Gates (Lennie James).

Either way Huntley’s a little stressed yet pretty relieved as you can imagine having orchestrated the rescue of a sexual assault victim from a burning flat and at the end of months of searching for a sleazy serial killer. Of course she’s rightfully hailed a hero by Paul Higgin’s slippery, insufferably RP-accented Chief Superintendent Derek Hilton (returning from the opening season). Yet why then does Roz seem to be continuously on edge? Perhaps it’s just being shell-shocked, but it would foolish not to at least ponder whether she’s up to something seriously dodgy.

Still, no reason for our “rats” at AC-12 to get involved, right? And here we are back again with our beloved three anti-coppers. So where have we been, guys?

Well, Vicky McClure’s feisty Kate Fleming seems to be enjoying herself rather a little too much in her most recent promotion to Detective Sergeant – albeit with yet ANOTHER change of haircut (this time surprisingly suiting her!). Of course this all comes with the grand annoyance of her charisma vacuum of a male colleague. Yes. It’s Martin Compston’s sexually overactive, baby-faced DS Steve Arnott who – despite having the hilarious facial expressions of a baffled badger wondering whether it’s passed wind – still succeeds in consistently pulling every vaguely attractive lady who passes his desk!

Oh Steve! Why do you have to be such an insufferable fun spoiler?! There’s no question that the blandly jaw-clenching Compston has always been the show’s weakest link in failing to capture the script’s obvious archetypes of the “rebellious rookie” – particularly out of hid depth in any attempt at angry responses which come across like a spoilt 2 year old throwing a hissy fit over his yucky food!

It’s unfortunate then that Steve’s infuriating arrogance and jealousy was brought directly into the fold this episode as Steve whined and winced so much that the ever-reliable Kate’s in-series referential jab at Steve having nearly brought about the collapse of the department almost felt too kind. If I was Kate, I’d have whacked him around the head with a fire extinguisher!

Thank heavens then that Adrian Dunbar is gently on-form to keep the peace as the steel-minded Belfastian figurehead DSI Ted Hastings. In a force resembling a snake pit of slimeball schemers and conniving, career-minded bureaucrats, Hastings has timely provided a rare beacon of moral hope - even if he never really seems to get any credit for it. Perhaps one of this episode’s greatest strengths was playing on Hasting’s unbiased father figure-like quality – refusing to pick sides between the two bickering kids (Kate and Steve). It’s likely without this much of the interaction would have played out little more than like brother and sister toddler squabbling over their latest Thomas the Tank Engine train!

And then we had arguably the season opener’s most deliciously creepy saving grace encapsulated by the supremely talented Jason Watkins as giant foreheaded forensics officer Tim Ifield – a man so skin-crawlingly peevish he makes ‘Dexter’s Dexter Morgan look like lovely Emma Stone!

Watkins chews up the dreary Police station scenery like a piranha devouring its prey in a chilling performance that leaves the audience to deceptively decide for themselves just whose side he’s on. From the episode’s outset, Ifield was depicted as being the single mere sole to see through Newton’s DCI Huntley and her presumed façade of a white Knightess in shining armour. Clearly even AC-12 don’t seem to find her blatantly melodramatic reactions anything to ponder about. Good thing therefore that Ifield was on-hand to discreetly point out to Steve a tad of inconsistency in Huntley’s conclusion that scared, emotionally vulnerable Michael Farmer (Scott Reid) is a malicious sexual predator  - on the basis of him being “retarded enough” for her to frame. It certainly seems like Ifield might be onto something - especially with his theory that a lack of DNA matching the belongings of the killer’s victims suggests they were very likely to be planted.

However – throughout the episode – I found myself pondering rather repetitively whether we should really be trusting this sinister-looking analysist – not least given Film/TV stereotypes tend to have a slightly too conspicuous dislike  for fiftysomething blokes with balding high foreheads!

It’s all very well that Ifield may believe there’s more to Huntley than meets the eye, but his constant crawling and darting in and out of corridors took fethishistic stalker vibes to an entirely new level. I was almost expecting Watkins to utter the chuckle-worthy phrase of “KHALEEEESI!” in the fashion of Jorah Mormont from ‘Game of Thrones’ (2011-).

Ah well, turns out I was pretty darn spot-on as the episode’s chainsaw-wielding ‘Dexter’-style cliffhanger most certainly indicated. Sadly though the same can’t be said about my emotional investment. Will Roz Huntley live to tell the tale? Or will she follow in the lines of ‘Line of Duty’s previous established series regulars and meet the chop within one hour of their introduction?

The crushing truth is that, frankly at times, one struggled to care. It’s easy to understand the average Rioja-sipping arm chair viewer’s complaints that the once punchingly down n’ dirty drama had been overshadowed by shrapnel-blowing attempts to burst into the mainstream. However – in returning to ‘Line of Duty’s office-based origins – I couldn’t help, but feel a clogging air of familiarity to the whole affair.  There’s something worryingly ‘CSI’ about this season’s hyper-stylized, Gotham City-lit cinematography and design that slides dangerously close to procedural. This unmistakably felt evident in the opening hour’s plethora of plastic sheets and ladies and gents in astronaut-looking outfits as they picked out tiny specimens from the mutilated crime scenes. Do we really need yet another serial murderer case?

After all, ‘Line of Duty’ has always thrived in its seasonal whodunits surrounding the guilt of the white-collar investigator’s themselves rather than that of it’s street criminals. I also found myself deeply struggling to identify with Newton’s slightly one-note shady copper. Any long-standing followers of the series would never dare to question the fact that any of the show’s yearly lead antiheroes have been underdeveloped in the slightest. Whether you resented DCI Gates’s toxic arrogance or DI Denton’s compulsive lying, Writer Mercurio never failed to give his audiences a tantalising insight into their pathetic or indeed sympathetic motivations.
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While it’s entirely possible we are yet to see the best of Huntley, this first ep was strongly lacking in any notion of a way into her clearly tormented psyche beyond Newton’s death-piercing glares. Thanks to a mix of Newton’s quiet performer act and some rather ambiguous exposition, we were left with a frustrated feeling of one holding back.
Of course perhaps that simply comes down to being in the nature of a standard season premiere, but Mercurio is going to have to come up with something radically fresh if he is to sustain one’s wavering attention span over the likely next 5 Sundays.
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