The worst part of Line of Duty – those ludicrous 'what happened next' captions
Warning: this article contains spoilers for the final episode of series five of Line of Duty
Line of Duty might have ended on a bit of soggy note – no, Hastings isn’t H; no, nobody knows who H is; yes, we’ll all just have to suck it up and try again next time – but at least one aspect of this otherwise-great show remained intact. Because, when it all wrapped up, we were treated to the same old Great British Bake Off "where are they now?" captions that always close out each series.
Once the action wrapped up, the fates of all the main players were once again spelled out for us. Operation Pear Tree is closed. Fleming and Arnott were commended for their work and absolved of their sins. Lisa McQueen and Gill Biggeloe changed their identities. Ted Hastings is still in charge of AC-12, but he still tries to perfect his macarons in his spare time. Which, you know, is nice of Jed Mercurio and everything. But so what?
It’s such an odd way to end a series. Captions like these are designed to add legitimacy to fact-based drama. They’re most often used at the end of documentaries or biopics, filling everyone in about what happened to the subjects after the window of the material closed, and their presence on Line of Duty is a sign that we’re supposed to give it documentary-level respect. This might have all really happened, we’re meant to think.
Except, shut up, no it didn’t. Line of Duty is the most absurd, preposterous, boink-a-doodle-doo programme on television. It has never encountered a plot twist too bananas. Episodes only exist so that key characters can get flung out of windows or beaten with pipes or goaded into yet another throat-slitting. Line of Duty is Luther. It’s a zombie movie. It’s a hen party on a train. To enjoy Line of Duty, you have to dull the part of your brain that controls all critical thought. The last thing it needs to do is convince you that it’s in any way realistic.
And that goes double now that Line of Duty is on BBC One. When it was the little BBC Two show that could, each Line of Duty series told its own story, so the captions could have feasibly doubled as an actual ending in the event of it not being recommissioned. Not that they offered much in the way of resolution, anyway, since they usually just concerned themselves with whether peripheral characters were successfully prosecuted and, if not, whether their whereabouts are known (they never are).
Sometimes these captions succeeded, when they offered a glimmer of new information – like the revelation in series three that nobody attended Lindsay Denton’s funeral – but more often than not they were concerned with busywork that the audience had already left far behind.
Still, ever since Line of Duty moved to BBC One, something has changed. It’s part of the establishment now. Its ratings are such that Mercurio can keep writing new episodes until his legs fall off, and they’ll end up on telly regardless.
More importantly, since series four, the whole show has been repurposed into a semi-serialised format complete with a mysterious overarching villain. There’s no point sending the characters off into the sunset with a nice caption, because we all know that everyone will soon be back exactly as we left them. Kate Fleming will still be rolling her eyes at all the passive-aggressive notes left for her by her exasperated git of a husband, Steve Arnott will still look, dress, talk and act like a snooker-obsessed 13-year-old on the way home from the helium factory and Ted Hastings will be Ted Hastings, albeit a version of Ted Hastings who is now contractually obliged to scrunch his eyebrows and glance off screen every three or four minutes in a forlorn attempt to fool anyone into thinking that he’s even vaguely corrupt.
The point is that Line of Duty is now an ongoing story, and a here’s-what-happened-next coda just looks weird on an ongoing story. Line of Duty is now caught in a trap of wanting to tell us things with captions, but also wanting to save the good stuff until the next series. As such, we're just left with nothing but inessential scraps.
This isn’t to say that Line of Duty doesn’t deserve captions. It’s just that the captions need to fit the tone of the show a little better. And since the tone of the show is absolutely bonkers, the captions might as well just follow suit. "Kate Fleming bought a speedboat and now hunts pirates with a harpoon gun". "Ted Hastings peeled off his skin like a satsuma to reveal that he was literally Jesus all along". "Steve Arnott’s beard and hair are an elaborate construction of squid ink and candyfloss, and his voice can only be heard by dogs". That sort of thing. Wouldn't that be so much better?