The Final Cut - Episode 2

In the second episode of The Final Cut, Urquhart's Cyprus plans and his pension plan begin to collide with his own past. In the Commons, Geoffrey Booza Pitt, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, announces the release of war documents relating to the conflict in Cyprus in the 1950s. It is a routine announcement, but it has consequences for the Prime Minister.

A young Greek Cypriot woman, Maria Passolides, approaches Urquhart and asks for help in finding the graves of her uncles, who were helping the resistance movement. Yolanda Vazquez plays her. At the public records office she and Urquhart find a record of the incident, but the names and map references have been blacked out. Urquhart promises to help her. Wikipedia's summary adds that the report was written by Urquhart himself, with his name removed.

Claire Carlsen, played by Isla Blair, arrives to argue her case for the job of Parliamentary Private Secretary. She tells him frankly that she is having an affair with Tom Makepeace, but says she wants to be on the winning side, and that side is his. Urquhart will take advantage of that.

He also provokes Makepeace. In the Commons he suggests that Britain should not adopt a European currency and that Europe should instead adopt English as its official language, When Urquhart offers Makepeace the Department of Education in place of the Foreign Office, Makepeace resigns. The Spectator's television columnist singled out an Urquhart joke and the scene in which Makepeace is sacked as very good, and thought Nickolas Grace, as the Chancellor, very good value.

News comes through that Sir Clive Watling, the judge chairing the international arbitration panel, has decided in favour of the Turkish side. Elizabeth and Urquhart toast their pension plan.

By the time the episode was shown on 12 November 1995, critics had already called the serial hopeless. The Spectator's columnist, Ian Hislop, wrote on 18 November that it was not actually that bad, though certainly a disappointment after House of Cards and To Play the King. He did not much care for the Cyprus plot, which he found rather silly, or for the asides to camera, which he thought overdone.

Mike Vardy directed, Andrew Davies wrote it, and the cast includes Nick Brimble as Corder and Dorothy Vernon as the Speaker. The BBC had warned viewers before the sex scene between Makepeace and Claire, whose effect Hislop called absurd.

IMDb voters give the episode 7.9 out of 10.