Undercover

[Serial_Apologist]

Yeah, but think of the scandal if a major local US politician gets elected and it transpires that he is a drug dealer, and being used as an undercover to entice / blackmail, AND a Brit lawyer sees his assassin's attempted execution as a purely racial issue and shames the US Supreme court into the his release - think Snowden, think Pananma Papers - but the US Govt. knows the real truth, that he is in fact an undercover for them.

Think of the hold The Scotsman would have over the FBI etc if that came out, and the scare he would have then if Maya uncovers this massive undercover scandal involving lots on both sides of the Atlantic. and if Nick really does get the story into the press in UK.........phew!!

There probably wouldn't be a paper in real life that would touch it...

[Richard Tarleton]

Have just watched the last episode, was baffled, have now read the rest of this thread and am even more baffled.

[Richard Tarleton]

The two-week gap didn't help I certainly don't think I could watch it again, I'm too cross.

Back to the beginning - why was Maya made DPP in the first place? Was this part of the conspiracy? What was the conspiracy, and whose was it? Why was the minister being arrested at the end - who had brought that about? What had he actually done? I can see that once Maya was DPP, they might want to use Nick to spy on her, but since the Scotsman is so all-powerful (he had the Minister under his thumb) why on earth was she made DPP in the first place, if it was just going to rake everything up? When Rudy whispered in her ear "He deserved to die", I thought for a moment he was talking about the mayor of Baton Rouge. I'd forgotten who the two people Maya saw talking to eachother who weren't supposed to know eachother were, and what the significance of this was.

And so on. I'm sure Draco's hypothesis fits the facts at our disposal, but on reading through the thread I simply don't agree we were given enough information about the American end, what the significance of Michael Antwi was there, etc. etc. And I don't understand why Nick smashed his listening device. Did he smash his wrist just to have somewhere to hide it?

As the Kate Abbott review quoted by jean said, there was quite enough this side of the Atlantic for one script. This all smacked (to me) of too-clever-by-half plotting.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

And I don't understand why Nick smashed his listening device. Did he smash his wrist just to have somewhere to hide it?

This is the only one of your questions that I think I can answer confidently - "Yes". ( - the only way he could smuggle the device through HoC security; and his broken wrist had to be seen by his Handler so that the baddies wouldn't be suspicious of the "pot".)

This all smacked (to me) of too-clever-by-half plotting.

I disagree - "not nearly clever enough"!

Meanwhile, the more formulaic (read "less pretentious") and rather overlooked Marcella on ITV is progressing towards what looks set to be a rather splendid and unpredictable conclusion tonight. A much better effort, IMO.

[aeolium]

Reading through recent days' posts on this thread make me very relieved that I bailed out after the first two episodes. I thought then that it looked like a turkey with a peacock cast and the disappointment over the conclusion seems to have borne that out.

I've been much more impressed by Line of Duty and also the first two series of Peaky Blinders which I was catching up on in preparation for the start of the third series.

[Dave2002]

But if the mayor was involved in drug-dealing, why not just expose his drug-dealing and get rid of him on those grounds? That way, any more shady involvements he may have had disappear without trace.

The problem is that we are not told any of this. It's not dramatically satisfactory for the viewer to have to speculate quite so much.

But c'mon, surely the whole thing is/was fantasy. Why was Maya faffing around all the time instead of "doing her job"? I think a real DPP would (a) have a team working with him/her, (b) have more things to think about than just one case and (c) not go round interviewing various criminals, suspects etc. Maybe I'm wrong - but I rather doubt it.

It was a bit of a romp - but surely not to be taken too seriously.

PS: this isn't aimed specifically at you, but at most of "us" who seem to have been taken in by this series. Fun while it lasted (maybe) but perhaps even more fatally flawed than most of the genre. I don't really know why we bother. Is life really that bad? Maybe if the alternative is listening to Bax .....[fill in the name of a composer you don't like much here ...]

[jean]

...It was a bit of a romp - but surely not to be taken too seriously...

So it turned out.

But from the fact that while preparing it, Moffat had talked to the women who'd been in relationships with undercover police officers, we (and they) had been encouraged to expect a more serious treatment of their experiences.