Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee little donkey - the Line of Duty finale of season six is nearly upon us! There is just one episode to go and, boy, do we still have some questions for Jed Mercurio to answer.
Our favorite anti-corruption officers Steve Arnott, Kate Fleming, and Ted Hastings have been back on our screens for the past six weeks, and it's all set to come to a head-on Sunday night.
Last night's Line of Duty viewing figures reached incredible new heights, with the penultimate episode bringing in 11 million viewers – a 51.7% audience share, according to the BBC's press office.
As we prepare for our last installment of Ted Hastings quotes, we've broken down all of the big questions that we still need answering before the season wraps, plus a handy recap of the most recent episode.
** Warning: spoilers up to the most recent episode of Line of Duty lie ahead! **
Line of Duty recap - episode 6
Episode 6 was packed with yet more Line of Duty acronyms. Following the tense shootout at the end of episode 5, AC-12 and DCS Patricia Carmichael arrived at the lorry park to find a deceased Ryan Pilkington with two gunshot wounds to the chest. (Side note, is anybody else sad we won't get an interview showdown scene with Ryan?) Kate and Jo however are nowhere to be found.
Carmichael then issues warrants for the women's arrests, describing them as armed and dangerous. The two officers are then seen heading to Steve's apartment, where Kate picks up his car keys and a burner phone. After a tense drive through the city center passing Gail Vella's home and Kingsgate Printing Services, they're apprehended by armed police and taken into custody. The bulk of the episode is a tense interview with this season's prime suspect, Jo Davidson, led by the incredible Anna Maxwell Martin as the show's most irritating character, Patricia Carmichael. We say tense, perhaps frustrating would be a better word; most of Jo's answers here are "no comment" because she's scared of the consequences from the OCG if she talks.
The team did confirm what we had suspected following the "homozygotic" DNA results – former OCG leader Tommy Hunter was both Jo's uncle and father. Her horrified reaction, coupled with the fact she thought her father was a police officer, suggests she had no idea this was the case. Despite not being forthcoming on his identity, she did confirm that Tommy had forced her to join the police force to do his bidding from the inside. Davidson also confessed to planting burner phones at Farida Jatri's home, the decoy during the mission to arrest Carl Banks, and that Terry Boyle was being framed. But when questions turn to the infamous "fourth man" and Marcus Thurwell, the SIO on the Lawrence Christopher case, she reverts back to "no comment".
Before Jo is finally taken back into custody, she does seemingly cover for Kate and claims that she was in fact the one to shoot and kill Ryan Pilkington, something that was legal as there was a credible threat to life. Carmichael later remarks to Kate that the "double-tap" shooting was consistent with being firearms trained, which Kate is but Jo Davidson is not. Pat has clearly rumbled these two, but Kate is released nonetheless.
Thankfully, AC-12 has the sense to set up security cameras both near and inside Jo's cell. So when those awful prison officers who burned Lindsay Denton's hands show up, they have to make their excuses and leave. It seems it's worked – for now. The final scenes show a raid of Marcus Thurwell's Spanish home, where both he and his wife are found dead. The flies suggest that the pair have been dead for a while, so was it really Thurwell who was communicating with Davidson over instant messenger? Or, is this a decoy and Thurwell isn't actually dead?
Line of Duty Season 6 finale—our burning questions
The plot is still very, very thick with only one episode to go, so here are the questions we still need answers to.
Who is H in Line of Duty?
This still is the question on every Line of Duty viewer's lips: who is H, the infamous police official working with the OCG? Until the most recent series we all thought this was one officer whose last name began with H, based on Dot Cottan's confession from the third series.
At this stage, even with Line of Duty, it feels like the fourth remaining "H" could be anybody from Patricia Carmichael to Philip Osborne, our beloved Ted Hastings, or even the unsuspecting (seeming) Ian Buckells.
Who did Jo think was her father?
During her interview, Jo Davidson that her mother, Samantha Davidson, had sadly committed suicide when Jo was a teenager, while her father was a bent police officer. She was visibly horrified to learn that DNA results had revealed Tommy Hunter, her uncle, was also her biological father.
It was implied that the man she thought was her father had also forced her to do the bidding of the OCG while working as a police officer. Jo only offered "no comment" when asked for his identity, something she also did in response to questions about Marcus Thurwell. She seemed visibly upset when his picture was brought up in the interview, so could he have been her father? Or, was it another senior member of the police, like Chief Constable Philip Osborne?
What is hiding in the OCG workshop?
After Kate was released from custody, she and Steve revisited the OCG workshop that was raided in episode 5 (and where two OCG nominals were shot by armed police). There they met DS Lomax, who revealed said OCG members' van had been full of all sorts of tools, including bolt cutters, power saws, and drills.
Kate gave the order for the GPR to investigate what was hiding under the concrete floor of the workshop (for the tape, GPR stands for Ground Penetrating Radar). So what will the team find? We have a feeling it's something crucial to the wider Line of Duty mystery.
Will there be a series 7 of Line of Duty?
As yet, we don't know if there'll be a Line of Duty Season 7. It feels like there are still a LOT of questions for show boss Jed Mercurio to answer, but he's not confirmed whether or not another series is on the cards. "We’re in a situation where it’s not entirely clear that there will be the seventh series," he recently told Radio Times. "We would hope there could be. But we’re having to do our planning coming out of COVID, and a whole bunch of other things, around the idea that these things aren’t guaranteed at all now."
It seems that the cast and crew would be up for another season, though. In an interview with The Guardian earlier this year, Martin Compston (who plays Steve Arnott) said he'd love at least one more series so that the team could enjoy filming in non-Covid times. "We want to leave a good legacy and be remembered as one of the great shows, not for a disappointing final series," he explained. "But this was a strange one to make, thanks to the horror show we’ve all been living through.
"We had a seven-month filming break, then came back under all the restrictions. The crew had to keep their distance. Masks made it harder to make a connection. The atmosphere on set wasn’t the same. It would be tough to end it that way. So on a personal level, it would be nice to do at least one more when life was back to normal and we could have a proper send-off."
How to watch Line of Duty in the US and anywhere in the world
If you're outside of the UK and don't have a Hulu, Prime Video, or Britbox subscription and are wondering how to watch Line of Duty, you'll need a VPN.
This is a really handy bit of software that changes your IP address so that streaming services like Netflix think you're in the UK.
Our sister site, TechRadar, has tested all of the major VPN services and they rate ExpressVPN as the absolute best. They say, "It's compatible with all of your devices, supports most streaming services, and ranks amongst the fastest. You can even install it on devices like an Amazon Fire TV Stick, Apple TV, Xbox, and PlayStation. So for a one-stop-shop, you can't go wrong with Express."
If you've never installed a VPN before, don’t worry. It's super simple to do in three quick steps:
See you on the sofa for the grand finale!
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