Fool me once, Jed Mercurio? Shame on you. Fool me literally every single time I watch one of your TV shows? Shame on me, and a crisp salute to you, big man. You got me. A blank in the gun though, and poor, traumatised Sgt Budd was back in the game. What an increasingly complex game it is. It could just be that the paranoia’s getting to me, but things seem to have gone meta on Bodyguard. A lot of episode four was actually episode three again, but freeze-framed and in black and white while people stood around computer monitors pointing at it like we’ve been doing all week. Bodyguard certainly isn’t grade-A bullshit, it’s a top-drawer head-scratcher with grade-A twists. Killing off a main character with three episodes to go is one such. Swivelling the Eye of Sauron away from Sgt Budd as the chief suspect in her murder to shine it on her successor Mike Travis and his monkey Rob Macdonald, is another. Mike and Rob are certainly colluding over something, but what? Is Commander Anne Sampson part of their deal? Was the chief whip/Julia’s ex-husband in on it too and only crying crocodile tears at her death? Did the prime minister mastermind it all? Where do ‘Richard Longcross’ and the Security Service fit in? What if, really, it’s all just terrorists? Has anybody seen my keys? (A Mercurio thriller distilled to its basic essence would be sixty silent minutes of characters staring wordlessly from one to the other through a venetian blind. And you know what? Ten million of us would still watch and be riveted.) Anne Sampson (Gina McKee) is a case in point. Just episodes ago, she was loudly proclaiming Julia Montague more dangerous than a python packing a knife and now she’s all ambiguous looks and “leave this with me, Deepak.” Her lot are firmly behind the ‘Tahir Mahmood, with the briefcase, in the auditorium’ theory, while the Security Service aren’t convinced. They are however, covering their tracks with regard to their arrangement with the home secretary. If it was Longcross or one of his pals who switched Budd’s bullets for blanks, then, because that memory stick was stored next to his gun, we can assume they also know that he knows that they know whatever it is they know about (we think) the cokey drunk of a prime minister (David Westhead). Whoever knows what, I’ll bet you Richard Madden’s twitching jaw muscle that we the viewers, don’t yet understand a thing. Rest in peace, Julia Montague. Until this knotty conspiracy has been untied, you’re the only one of us who’ll be able to. Read Louisa’s review of the previous episode here.
