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Bodyguard finale, review: excruciatingly anxious scenes were let down by an average plot

PS Budd had to navigate a particularly tricky commute in the finale of Bodyguard - Ep 6
PS Budd had to navigate a particularly tricky commute in the finale of Bodyguard - Ep 6

So after all that, it turned out that Julia Montague really had departed half way through episode four, and by the end of the 75 minutes that made up the finale of Bodyguard, part of me wished that I had, too.

It wasn’t that this was bad television – quite the opposite, to have 11 million people tuning in each week. It was more that it was good television that could have been brilliant, but somehow failed to reach its potential. 

Watching the final episode unfold felt a bit like witnessing a grade-A student open up their envelope on exam results day to find a string of Bs. It had tried too hard to impress, and ended up collapsing under the weight of its own expectations. It was twisty, of course, but not half as twisty as fevered social media speculation had perhaps hoped it would be, and the really exceptional bits of drama took place not in the big reveals, but the excruciatingly anxious set-pieces leading up to them.

Our hero David Budd – and we all knew, deep down, that he was always going be the hero, didn’t we? – began the episode with a suicide bomb strapped to his hunky bodyguard chest, his thumb pressed down furiously on a dead man’s switch, or DMS as it came, not-so-affectionately, to be known. 

In many ways the DMS was the real star of the Bodyguard finale, though Budd (Richard Madden) made a good stab at things with his continued brooding, even in the face of being blown up. He had to navigate a particularly tricky commute to work, one that made squeezing in on the Northern Line during rush hour look like a doddle. 

Gina McKee as Annie Sampson - Credit: BBC
Gina McKee as Annie Sampson Credit: BBC

These scenes took your breath away. The score made your head feel as if it was filled with Semtex; the bomb disposal officer’s repeated advice to Budd to “maintain pressure on the DMS switch” maintained pressure on one’s adrenal glands. It was like watching a particularly high-pressure, life-or-death Blue Peter segment. 

But having made fantastic efforts to gain our attention in the most spectacular of fashions, writer Jed Mercurio then just seemed to drop it. 

It was Line of Duty for dummies, the plot twists not really feeling worth the energy expended to get to them. 

Richard Madden as PS Budd - Credit: BBC
Richard Madden as PS Budd Credit: BBC

The assassination of the home secretary, Julia Montague, was, in the end, the work of Nadia (Anjli Mohindra), the apparently bullied wife who had been coerced into strapping on a suicide vest and almost blowing up a train in episode one. That was by way of Budd’s boss Lorraine Craddock (Pippa Haywood), who had leaked Montague’s security plans to criminal mastermind Luke Aitkens (Matt Stokoe), who seemed to want the home secretary dead because her planned legislation would get in the way of selling expensive cocktails to extras from Made in Chelsea in his shadowy underground nightclubs. 

Aitkens told Budd that killing the home secretary had just been “business”, but in that case one wondered why he hadn’t just employed a good lobbying firm. It would have saved a lot of lives, not to mention jail time.

In the end, perhaps the biggest twist of all was that Budd ended up going to occupational health to seek help for the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder he was almost certainly suffering from. As a mental health campaigner, I suppose this should have pleased me, but I suspect that this was not the ending that most viewers had tuned in for. 

The final scene, where Budd drove off into the sunset with his estranged wife and children, made me feel as if I was watching Brookside rather than Bodyguard. And it left the biggest plot hole open, namely: where is his wife’s new man? A second series surely beckons, but without the incredible Keeley Hawes in it, who played Montague to perfection, I am not sure I am all that interested.