The Chill Factor

The season ends where it began, with Clark's personal life and his job colliding. Jenny Dean is dead by her own hand, and Clark cannot leave it alone. But his enquiries into why she did it keep leading back to the CIB itself, which is a bad sign for an organisation built on investigating everyone else. There are conflicting reports about who has been suspended, Commander Huxtable or DCC Dunning, and the episode doesn't go out of its way to settle it.

J. C. Wilsher wrote the finale, Alan Dossor directed it, and both are in no hurry. The grief is given room, and the investigation is allowed to wind through the department's corridors before it arrives where it was always heading: a confrontation, aboard H.M.S. Belfast of all places, with an enemy Clark didn't see coming. The London museum ship makes an odd stage for a climax, which is exactly why it works.

The real fight, though, is with Chief Supt. John Deakin, the fireproof man whose power decides which methods high-ranking detectives may use. Clark ends the season at odds with him, having exposed the structure without breaking it. That's the honest version of the ending, and the show sticks with it.

The regulars are all here for the last lap, Siobhan Redmond's Connell and Tom Georgeson's Naylor among them, with John Shrapnel's Dunning and David Lyon's Huxtable orbiting the wreckage. It's a finale that feels like a door closing rather than a curtain, which is right. The Jenny Dean story gets its answer, and the cost of it is left sitting in the room. The investigation and the grief run side by side, and the episode never lets the sorrow become scenery. Wilsher and Dossor both seem to understand that a finale should answer its questions without pretending the answers are cheap.