Ordeal by Innocence review: the finale of this Christie mystery was a real belter

So there we have it. In the flashback-packed finale to Ordeal By Innocence (BBC One), everyone in the Argyll household was carefully supplied with a motive to put an end to beastly materfamilias Rachel (Anna Chancellor).

But in the end it was  Leo (Bill Nighy) in the drawing room with the statuette of the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis. Of course it  was. He was suspiciously passive. The local detective being (a) corrupt and (b) dead, it was left to the family  to mete out summary justice. Even though scriptwriter Sarah Phelps had spoken out about her changes  to the story, the new denouement was quite a jolt.

At the same time, the final image of Kirsten (Morven Christie) ignoring Leo’s howls was eerily familiar: his basement incarceration by the woman that he’d raped and impregnated was identical to the twist in a recent Inside No 9.

So Rachel’s nuclear bunker was provided with a plot role just in time. I don’t think it quite justified the gusts of atomic paranoia that permeated  the story like a synthetic spray. Frustratingly the source of Rachel’s anxieties about the bomb went unexplored. “You won’t break me,”  she warned the probing Jack in the second episode as he found out what made her tick. And she was proved dead right.

While the script was very hot on the genetic source  of Jack’s malignancy, it never  disclosed why Rachel was quite such a Gorgon. Infertility and infidelity don’t quite cover it.

ordeal by innocence changes

But what fun to watch Chancellor take command. Drugging, slapping, crushing, aborting – she was overdue her big moment. So was Christie who seized hers with heart-wrenching sincerity.

“How did you bear it?” Jack asked, having discovered that  she gave him away at birth. “I just  did,” she said in a tiny voice. Anthony Boyle, an exceptional talent, was thrillingly equal to Jack’s wild fury and boyish vulnerability.

The delay occasioned by reshooting some sections after an enforced cast change meant that the queasy Christmas scenes lost some context.  “I never really enjoy Christmas,” said Jack as things fell apart. “But this one is shaping up to be a real belter.” With its doomy soundtrack, gloomy visuals and the hyper-intense performances, this adaptation really was.