The Final Act (1)

Jane Tennison is nearing retirement, and a fourteen-year-old girl has gone missing. The case pulls her into a world of teenage girls she has not spent much time in lately, and into the tangled lives of the Philips and Sturdy families. Everyone connected to the girl has a version of events; none of them match. The investigation starts from the usual place: too many suspects, too few facts.

She works the disappearance with DS Alun Simms and DCS Mitchell, and the deeper she goes, the more hidden depths she finds. But the depths are not only in the missing girl's story. The people closest to the case are the ones holding the most back, and Jane, who has spent a career reading rooms full of hostile men, notices. Nobody is lying outright; everybody is holding something back, which is harder to work with. She is working with people she has known for years, which makes the silences between them easier to read. This is the last run for the character, and the script knows it: the questions Jane asks here are the ones she has been asking her whole career.

The production notes do not record a writer or director for this one, which is a shame. Helen Mirren's Jane is supported by Stephen Tompkinson as Sean Philips, Laura Greenwood as Penny Philips, Eve Best as Linda Philips, Gary Lewis as Tony Sturdy, Katy Murphy as Ruth Sturdy, Frank Finlay as Arnold Tennison, Tom Bell as Bill Otley, Robert Pugh as DS Alun Simms and Brendan Coyle as DCS Mitchell.

Even at the end, Jane is still finding out things about people she thought she understood. The hidden depths are not all in the missing girl's story, and neither are the answers. It is a quiet episode for a character used to noise, and the change suits her. She is not the same officer she once was, and the episode does not pretend she is.