Line of Duty series 4 episode 5 review: will Roz get away with it?

Just when it seemed everything had gone wrong for her – and Thandie Newton's dastardly detective did lose an arm – she appeared to get out of trouble yet again.

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But this time the person she seemed to be successfully framing in order to further her own interests was her own husband Nick (Lee Ingleby, below).

You can’t keep a corrupt copper down it seems, as Nick’s arrest formed one of the dramatic closing moments of yet another gripping visit to the coppers of AC-12.

And the credit must go to a first rate cast and a first rate writer, with Jed Mercurio wrong-footing us once more. Every episode this series has taken us in a wholly new direction so goodness knows what is going to happen in the series finale.

It started with AC-12 heavily on the back foot. DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) was in a wheelchair and the team had been recused from investigating the dastardly folk at Polk Avenue nick.

“They’re not scared of us any more,” bemoaned DS Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) whose undercover role had been exposed by Roz last week. But Ted Hastings was having none of it. “If we go down, we go down fighting," he said.

And being AC-12 they kept ferreting away.

Firstly, Steve managed to persuade Roz’s chief suspect/patsy Michael Farmer to not submit a guilty plea with the smart (and compassionate) tactic of letting him see his grandmother.

In a moving, highly charged moment she persuaded her grandson not to admit to something he didn’t do. “OK Nana…. not guilty, Nana, not guilty…” he said.

And the anti-corruption team also turned up some intriguing new signs suggesting yet more fabrication of evidence, including the planted Tim Ifield DNA found on the body of Leonie Collersdale.

Quite why these eagle-eyed coppers haven't noticed Roz’s injured left arm – the one she could barely move and kept hiding from them during her inquisition last week - had me stumped. In tonight’s episode her husband Nick was complaining that it had started to “stink”.

But there's no hiding the fact that it has now been amputated. AC-12 have applied for a court order to investigate her medical files, which should lead to some interesting developments in the final episode.

Roz also has the added problem that her colleague Neil (Michael Stobbart, below) has had enough of her and confided in AC-12 about her consistent scuppering of the Trapdoor investigation.

Still, one whistleblower and one lost limb aren’t going to stop our chief antagonist, are they? And Roz cleverly manoeuvered her way into a position where her husband is now the chief suspect.

Nick was left flapping in the police station, telling his smoothy-chops lawyer friend Jimmy Lakewell (Patrick Baladi) that Roz is “lying about everything”. Well, yes. But since when has that stopped her?

Roz, meanwhile, was able to look on as her husband was questioned, her ghastly sidekick Jodie (Claudia Jessie) being as sycophantic as ever and telling her how “incredibly brave and honest” she was being.

In other news poor old Hastings was left in a bind – having been served with a regulation 15 notice and possible disciplinary action because of the revelations contained in Matthew “Dot “ Cottan’s dying declaration (thanks Maneet, for giving Hilton that).

According to the terms of this notice, it seems that he has NOT been suspended and will be free to lead the investigation, however hamstrung it now is.

Because next week we have an AC-12 with a father figure under suspicion, and with Roz in a strong position. Added to that, Steve looks a broken man, barely able to move or keep house.

But they’re AC-12. They can turn this around. Can’t they?

This article was originally published in April 2017