“I’m sure you realise the net is closing…”
How to play the Bodyguard episode 5 drinking game – take a shot every time somebody says “kompromat” (though you may find it even trickier than usual to keep up with the show’s twisty-turny plot).
The penultimate chapter of Jed Mercurio’s nation-gripping thriller is every bit as talky as last week’s – there’s no huge set piece of the sort that typified the first three episodes. But while a slightly frustrating episode four posed more questions than it answered, here the balance is far more even.
© BBC/World Productions/Sophie Mutevelian
Across the first half of the series, Bodyguard expanded, before quite literally exploding. Now, it’s beginning to contract, Mercurio tightening his grasp on the various story strands and drawing them all together.
And thankfully, with the story now unfolding at such a pace, he doesn’t seem to feel the need to resort to the slightly cheap thrills of last week – e.g. Budd’s botched suicide attempt – to pique our interest.
Teaming up with SO15 officer Louise Rayburn (Nina Toussaint-White), Budd’s investigation into Julia Montague’s murder is beginning to bear fruit. But as the conspiracy is untangled, Budd’s mind too starts to unravel.
There’s a neat symmetry found in scenes of Budd (Richard Madden), once again sat alone in his flat, in the dark, brooding. Whereas before he was looking up articles about Julia’s voting record, fueling the animosity he felt towards her, now he’s wet-eyed about her loss and reading her obituaries.
Budd’s recent trauma is threatening to break his already fragile mind, and where he used to use work and the need to support his family as an excuse not to seek help, now he’s using the enquiry into Julia’s death.
© BBC/World Productions/Sophie Mutevelian
Before he implodes, he’s determined to unmask Julia’s killer. But this puts Budd in a difficult, and fascinating, position: wanting more than anything to cover the truth about his dead lover’s murder, while also desperately trying to keep his own secrets hidden.
This week, SO15 finally identify the sniper who took potshots at the Home Secretary – apparently the search involved clicking through military personnel files, one-by-one – and David isn’t being wholly philanthropic when he volunteers to lead the investigation into the Thornton Circus shooting.
The ostensibly ‘good’ male lead who is nonetheless undermined by his weaknesses seems to be a fixation for Mercurio – like Budd, Line of Duty‘s Steve Arnott was an investigating official who compromised his work by sleeping with Keeley Hawes. If anything, though, Budd is even more morally murky, and appealingly conflicted.
© BBC/World Productions/Sophie Mutevelian
By episode’s end, David is placed on indefinite leave and asked to seek medical help. He’s totally out in the cold, having even pushed away his one real ally Louise, under the incorrect assumption that it was she who expressed concerns about his wellbeing to the higher-ups.
With his poor mental health and relationship with Julia exposed, only Budd’s connection to the Thornton Circus sniper is now left to be discovered. And for anyone still questioning why his relationship with Julia had to be romantic, it was a pivotal choice that here further undermines his credibility as investigator.
Can he possibly solve this case before everything comes tumbling down around him? As Bodyguard approaches its climax, this is the most vital question underpinning everything.
Solving enough of the show’s recent mysteries – the parts that Rob Macdonald and the briefcase, played, or rather didn’t play, in the RIPA ’18 bombing – to leave us feeling satisfied, the latest Bodyguard still leaves us with multiple candidates in the frame for both the terror attacks and Julia’s murder: MI5, the Prime Minister and his lackeys, even crime lord Luke Aitkens (Matt Stokoe).
With so much still left to resolve, Mercurio will need every single second of the finale’s 75 minutes to bring this tangled, slightly uneven, but utterly addictive thriller to the convincing close we’re all hoping for.
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