Red Riding 1984 on C4

It doesn't get any better for West Yorkshire Police in the final instalment of Red Riding, this time set in 1983 with scenes from 1974 thrown in. That gangland nature and the corruption get dragged to the fore this week, as David Morrissey's Jobson becomes increasingly disillusioned. We're also given an idea of what Abu Ghraib might look like if the troops there had read Orwell's 1984, when Warren Clarke uses a caged rat as a torture device. He taunts Peter Mullan's Martin Laws with “We don't like rats!” - clearly a man who knows his Orwell.

This is a beautifully-shot episode, especially the scenes where Morrissey is smoking. There's also some nifty camera work to watch for when he first interviews Myshkin (Daniel Mays) and then again when Piggott (Mark Addy) talks to Leonard's (Gerard Kearns) girlfriend in his living room.
It's just a shame there's so much jumping about and messing with chronology. Sometimes, it's pretty tricky to work out which year we're looking at – more than once I had to wait for someone to appear whose facial hair was an indicator of which decade we were in.

But that jumping about does give a chance to point out all the little things Red Riding has been seeding through the previous two instalments, and they can bring back some of the earlier characters too. I don't want to give away the ending, because it's rather surprising, and also because I don't think I fully understand it. It could be that Red Riding leaves a lot of loose plot threads, or it just be very complicated, or just leaving a lot unspoken for us to work out ourselves.

The 1983 instalment again looks at a missing schoolgirl, this one connected to the girl in 1974 in that she went to the same school, and is later found with swan wings stitched into her back. But the man who took her is in jail, Myshkin, right? Wrong. Piggott is the slovenly solicitor given the unenviable task of appealing for the mentally-handicapped man who confessed under Police pressure in 1974. He (somewhat improbably) emerges as rather a hero, alongside Jobson, at the end.