Daniel Brierley’s bomb squad series does one thing superbly: it puts Vicky McClure in front of a device and makes us hold our breath. The plot that joins those scenes together is daft in the first hour and dafter by the last.
Daniel Brierley’s series puts Vicky McClure in the London bomb squad and gives her, roughly, one device an hour for six hours. She plays Lana Washington, an explosives officer with the Metropolitan Police, and the show arrives with the Line of Duty connection attached, both through McClure herself and through the team behind it. The pitch is plain: a procedural about the people who walk towards the thing everyone else is running from. When Trigger Point is doing that, it is as tense as anything on British television. When it is doing anything else, it is nonsense, and it does a great deal else.
The defusals are the point and they are properly built. Nick Gillespie and Alfie Biddle shoot them close and low, mostly at the height of a kneeling woman, so that a car boot or a stairwell fills the frame and the rest of London disappears. The editors, David I’Anson and Peggy Koretzky, are disciplined enough to hold on a hand and a pair of pliers for longer than most television would dare, and to cut away only when something changes. Anna Pritchard designs the devices as ugly, homemade things, tape and nails and a phone, which is far more frightening than anything with a blinking countdown. The first episode’s opening half-hour had us sitting forward, tense and slightly cross with ourselves for it, because we knew exactly what was being done to us and it worked anyway.
McClure is the reason it works. She plays Lana as someone who has done this so often that the fear has gone somewhere behind her eyes, and the performance is almost entirely in stillness: a breath held, a jaw set, a glance at a wire and back again. Cal MacAninch’s Robins gives her a boss who trusts her and worries about her in roughly equal measure and says little about either. Mark Stanley’s Youngblood is the detective who has to make the wider plot happen, and Stanley does what he can with a man whose function is to walk into rooms and demand updates. Manjinder Virk’s DI Samira Desai has the sharpest lines of the supporting cast and is given the least to do with them.
The trouble is everything between the bombs. Brierley writes the investigation as a chain of suspects, and the series has a habit of pointing at each one in turn as if the camera were a finger. A character will say something faintly odd, the score will note it, and three episodes later the oddness will be explained at length by another character to a third. We laughed, more than once, at scenes in which police officers told each other things they both already knew, and by the fifth hour we were laughing at moments that were meant to be grave. The first episode ends with a turn we will not describe, and most critics rightly admired its nerve; nothing afterwards is as bold, and the final hour tries to tie up its clues in a way that made us check whether we had missed an episode. We had not.
The directors, five of them across six hours including Gilles Bannier and Jennie Darnell, keep the look consistent, which is no small thing on a series made this way. Rosalind Ebbutt’s costumes do quiet work too: Lana in the same heavy kit and hi-vis for scene after scene, the detectives in suits that have been sat in too long. The city itself, estates and A-roads and car parks, is shot without glamour, and that plainness suits the show far better than the plot does.
Line of Duty earned its silliness by making the interviews as gripping as the shootouts; here the equivalent scenes are the ones you talk over. The consensus among critics is warmer than we are, and we understand why, because most of the reviews were written after the first episode, which is the best one. Watched to the end, the shape is clearer: a set of first-rate set pieces hung on a story that would not survive a second viewing. It carries a 15 certificate, runs to six episodes, and three further series have followed, which tells you the set pieces were enough for a great many people. Watch the first hour with the lights off and decide for yourself whether the rest is worth the shouting.
