The Shadow Line, Series Finale, BBC Two

I see there are still a few brave souls trying to peddle the "searing televisual masterpiece" line, often in high-profile BBC publications, but I suspect rather more of us may have been veering towards an ever-healthier scepticism as Hugo Blick's wilfully obtuse noirathon ran around in increasingly demented circles. I wouldn't go as far as theartsdesk commenter "Gengis Cohen", who characterises The Shadow Line as "dreadful plotless, sub-Pinteresque nonsense" before really warming to his theme... but after a couple of drinks, y'know, you start thinking maybe he's not all that wrong.

Having hunkered down for the first six hours, brow furrowed and notebook at the ready to try and grab some of those dizzily ricocheting fragments, it was reasonable to expect a bit of mystery and transcendence from the final episode. Instead, it was more of a weary rolling out of great chunks of exposition, laboriously joining dots which would have been better left in an ambiguous murk. Then everybody got killed.

The most indigestible portfolio of revelations was allotted to Commander Penney (played by Nicholas Jones, still looking for that elusive role which will let him trump his portrayal of the magnificently idiotic Jeremy Aldermartin in Kavanagh QC). Penney had the thankless task of filling in a suitably perplexed-looking DI Gabriel (Chiwetel Ejiofor) on exactly where the dodgy money had come from, how it acquired its secret codes, how Harvey Wratten (RIP) had used it to buy a load of drugs to use as leverage for his Royal Pardon, where the remorselessly sinister Gatehouse had learned his trade...

But surely we'd got Gatehouse's number ages ago? From the start, Stephen Rea semaphored this thin-lipped killing machine as a pantomime George Smiley (scarf, trilby, 1960s overcoat), except he only had one note on his scale in contrast to Alec Guinness's subtle symphony of suggestion. And - dear God, how jejune - he went around blowing holes in people with a gun, failing entirely to evoke that inner world measured in minuscule gradations of failure, cowardice, compromise and betrayal which are the essence of the Le Carré-esque hinterland he seemed to be teasing us with (Ejiofor with Clare Calbraith as Laura Gabriel, pictured above).

Ultimately, Blick's fearfully clever plotting turned out to be a bunch of familiar espionage/thriller components turned in on themselves so they pointed out instead of in, though I have to admit that the climactic revelation that all the secret money laundering had been carried out in order to prop up the police pension fund did take me by suprise. Although not in a good way. It's not really that difficult to keep an audience confounded and bamboozled if you just take a bunch of storylines, cut them into little pieces and feed them back in a confusing order. The really hard part is making viewers care about the characters and feel that they've gained something from the effort they've put in.

Myself, I'd give Ejiofor the marble clock for managing to inject some soul and pathos into Gabriel, a man battling doggedly to patch the holes in his damaged memory while simultaneously trying to breathe the life back into his marriage. There was careful and concentrated work, too, from Christopher Eccleston as Joseph Bede, who almost succeeded in pulling off the paradoxical feat of being a good man, harrowed beyond reasonable limits by his wife's mental disintegration, who made his living by trading gargantuan shipments of heroin.

Elsewhere, Rafe Spall's turn as the tittering psychopath Jay Wratten just made you wish somebody would give him a good slapping and send him to bed without any supper. The glib and sneering Superintendent Patterson (Richard Lintern) sneered glibly throughout every episode without any noticeable change of tone, pace or intensity. They could have left out Antony Sher's Glickman (pictured above) altogether and it wouldn't have made much difference. I can pinpoint the one moment where I felt burned by any real emotion, which was the encounter between Gabriel's wife and his former mistress at the funeral of the latter's son. Otherwise, this seemed like a bunch of characters divided by a common author.