The Loyal

The season ends in chaos, which is only fair, since the whole series has been building to it. Mount Eden falls apart around Grace Ellis while she tries to get Henry out from under Lee's control, and the episode makes you feel every hour of the losing battle. Loyalty is the theme, in case the title was too subtle. The question running through it is simple: who stays loyal when it costs them? It's not a rhetorical question, and the episode treats it as a working one.

Happy finally learns the truth. But it arrives the way truths usually do here, late enough to hurt, and his reckoning becomes the episode's still centre. The hour cuts between the big collapse in the estate and the small, quiet reckonings, and the two keep feeding each other until the finale feels earned rather than noisy. The chaos is never decorative; every piece of it has a face and a name, and the episode takes the time to give you each one.

Lawn and Patterson wrote it, Jack Casey directed, and it aired in May 2024 as the season closer. Siân Brooke carries the heavy end as Grace, with Katherine Devlin, Nathan Braniff and Martin McCann in strong support. The usual faces do their usual solid work, which is exactly the comfort the show can afford to rely on by now. Whatever the series has been circling all along, this is where it lands, without ceremony and without a speech. The finale has the courage to let some of its biggest moments pass almost without comment.

The second series closes with a mess that nobody gets to sweep up in a hurry. It's a brave ending, and a truthful one. The job doesn't tie off its loose ends just because the credits are rolling. It leaves the station mid-breath, which is where it found it.