Puzzling finales are as old as literature. Line of Duty is nothing new
It’s not just breaking up, but ending, that can be hard to do. How many departing audiences have said wistfully, of the play they have just seen, “The first half was so much better than the second”? Thrillers, as a genre, are prone to the anticlimactic ending, as loose ends are – or aren’t – tied up neatly and pyrotechnics are dampened, sometimes to fading to a splutter. For many, the understated ending of season six of the BBC TV drama Line of Duty came as a disappointment. Still, the fact that the series did not finish with guns blazing but, rather, with the weary recognition that corruption is banal, unglamorous and omnipresent, seemed peculiarly apt for the political moment.
Epics, no less than twisty-turny police procedurals, find endings difficult. Delay is their stock in trade, a necessary means of stretching and complicating their action. Hence, Achilles sulks in his tent for much of Homer’s Iliad; in the Odyssey, the hero fails to get home for 10 years (albeit spending many of them trapped comfortably on the nymph Calypso’s island). In Virgil’s Aeneid, Rome’s national epic, there must be a difficult and eventful journey from Asia Minor to Italy, followed by a war, before the hero, Aeneas, can truly be said to have fulfilled his epic purpose. A compliant Achilles, a navigationally successful Odysseus, or an unopposed Aeneas, would have made for substantially less epic epics. As it is, these poems find it easier to be in the middle of the tangle of their events than to wrap them up, and none of these poems ends in ways that have uncomplicatedly satisfied their audiences over the millennia.
