OK, I watched the last episode of Bodyguard last night and I need some help getting my head around this because I can’t tell if I was just missing the point or if maybe it was actually… not very good? Spoilers abound, obviously.

So, as I understood it, there were two conspiracies. In one of them, a coalition of terrorists and organised crime, aided by David’s corrupt boss, plotted a series of giant terrorist attacks and the assassination of the Home Secretary in order to… convice parliament not to pass legislation designed to curtail terrorism and organised crime. Hmmm. Is this plan, perhaps, unlikely to succeed? Someome might have pointed this out to terrorist mastermind Nadia, given that she decided to confess everything at the very end for no reason whatsoever, or perhaps they had a cut scene of James Bond being suspended over a tank of sharks by a rope gradually being burned through by a candle and she wanted him to know what a genius she was before he fell into the tank and got eaten alive hey what do you mean he escaped? Well never mind, they dropped the legislation anyway, so I guess the terrorists won? Yay?

In the other conspiracy, there was some kompromat - a highly satisfying word to type, by the way - that what appeared to me to be the same group of people spent a huge amount of effort getting into the hands of the Home Secretary and then a huge amount of effort trying to get back, simultaneously giving her the power to blackmail the Prime Minister and trying to ruin her reputation by giving her a speech riddled with mistakes, but wait hang on that was just an excuse to get poor Tarik to step on the pressurised pad that set off the bomb planted by the conspirators in conspiracy one, only there was no other connection between conspiracy one and conspiracy two so the briefcase thing was just a coincidence and the bomb was just terribly badly designed, or was there a joint conspiracy and I missed it because ever since Keely Hawes died I have slightly spent the time watching this also playing Sudoku? It would have helped if any of the Home Office / Security Forces characters had been differentiated from each other except for “tall, anoyed” or “short with glasses, annoyed” or “the creepy one from Utopia, creepy”. I got that the security forces and the police HATED each other, but I never figured out if there were factions within the security forces, but even if there were, they all seemed to use the same sinister fixer guy whose real name we never found out and who ended up with a faceful of teargas. I never figured out who lost or won, or what anybody’s ultimate plan was, so I didn’t know whether whatever whoever wanted to have occured had indeed occured, and cared less.

There were pleasures. I was very invested in David and Julia before they killed Julia, and I remained invested in David afterwards, because he was a genius strategic thinker who seemed rather wasted in his previous job of standing still near politicians, though I’m not convinced they did anything particularly interesting with his PTSD. The action sequences were fantastically tense - Jed Mercurio has enviable skill, also frequently in evidence on (the far superior) Line of Duty, in taking the bland stuff real police are scripted to say and making it bloody terrifying. Plus I hugely enjoyed Chanel who appeared to have stepped directly out of Made in Chelsea with her amazingly insincere affect (I mean it’s possible she was a bad actress but I am sincerely more inclined to think she is a comic genius with a gift for mimicry of that very particular style of talking).

Overall I feel sad that everyone got excited about this rather than Line of Duty, but I will probably watch season 2 when it happens anyway, because I still believe in Jed Mercurio. And I really really hope they bring back Chanel.