Part 6

The finale begins in a Bern safe flat, where Smiley breaks Grigoriev. The lever is a photograph of the diplomat with a consular clerk and the certainty that his wife will be told, but what finally gets his cooperation is his own small appetite for power, indulged when Smiley lets him tell his wife he is delayed on a matter of state secrets. Grigoriev gives up the arrangement: he was recruited by Karla at a trade conference in Moscow, he draws the monthly money and pays the clinic, and he sends weekly written reports to Karla through the embassy courier on the girl's appearance, her manner and her attitude. He has assumed she is Karla's daughter, and he cannot be sure.

What Smiley now holds is the one thing no professional lever could have given him: a private crime, paid for out of Moscow Centre's own money, which Karla's rivals in the Centre would use to destroy him. He writes to Karla through the channel Grigoriev has built, and makes the offer: come across and his daughter is protected, refuse and the evidence goes to Moscow Centre, which will finish him. It is the act Smiley is least willing to have on his record. Guinness's own account of playing the part was that he wanted the audience to feel Smiley's sadness, particularly over the fact that he uses blackmail, which is inadmissible, to achieve his ends, and to feel that by the end Smiley and Karla are in some way interchangeable, both lonely men using similar methods.

Smiley goes to the clinic to see the girl, who is held under the false name Alexandra, built for her out of the identity of Ostrakova's real daughter. Then Karla comes. Smiley, Guillam and Esterhase, with Esterhase's team, wait at the East-West crossing in Berlin, and Karla crosses alone. As he passes Smiley, stopping to light a cigarette, he drops the gold cigarette lighter he took from Smiley twenty years earlier in a Delhi prison, a gift from Ann. Smiley does not pick it up. He is sickened at having had to use Karla's methods against him, and he takes no satisfaction from the only victory the story allows him.

The ending is played against everything the serial has built, and it is carried by an object and a refusal. The lighter is a private gift taken two decades earlier and now used as the marker of a professional win; dropping it is Karla's last act of characterisation, and leaving it on the ground is Smiley's. Patrick Stewart's Karla never speaks, which is the design: BFI Screenonline calls him an enigmatic, almost abstract adversary, and the confrontation is carried by Guinness's face. Very few genre serials give their protagonist the win they have spent five parts earning him and then withhold the satisfaction.

The weakness is that the ending is compressed relative to the preparation. The turning of a senior Soviet officer in a Bern flat is a large act to hang on one interrogation sequence, and the criticism that the serial's plot exists to support its gallery of weary, fascinating characters is at its most pointed here. The bridge was not shot in Berlin at all: it was filmed at Lady Bay Bridge in Nottingham, standing in for the crossing.

Where it sits is at the end of the only part of the serial in which Smiley is the aggressor rather than the enquirer, and the only one whose resolution the audience has been shown in advance to be achievable solely by the methods the serial disapproves of. The awards record closes here: four BAFTAs from ten nominations, a Peabody, and three Primetime Emmy nominations without a win, one of them for Simon Langton's direction of this part. It leaves its hero with the victory, no satisfaction, and a lighter he will not touch.