Review: Best yet as Grace bows out with double cliff-hanger

It’s been the strongest season so far, and in a series in which the pacing has been so perfect right from the start, season three finished this evening with the strongest episode so far – a compelling couple of hours in which the personal lives of the core characters seemed to take more of a back seat than usual. Until, that is, those closing moments – moments which left Grace’s past and his future on a total collision course. It’s going to be a painfully long wait until season four; it really cannot come soon enough.

This has been the season where the actors – Simm plus Richie Campbell as DS Glenn Branson, Zoë Tapper as Cleo Morey, Craig Parkinson as DS Norman Potting and Laura Elphinstone as DS Bella Moy – have absolutely claimed the core characters as their own, made them live and breathe and made them exist inside and outside our Sunday evenings, fully independent, completely convincing people who intersect so captivatingly.

But is has also thrown up rich and complex challenges for them, particularly tonight. And the brilliance of the episode, as ever, was just how cleverly the disparate parts were brought together by the time 10 o’clock chimed. A rather odd pop star (excellent from Victoria Emslie as Gaia Lafayette) is distraught when her drummer is gunned down on the doorstep, clearly mistaken for her. Meanwhile, another singer is on her tail, alleging she nicked her biggest song from her. Making matters worse, her manager is a pretty dodgy geezer clearly in thrall to a newly released convict with a penchant for breaking fingers. Meanwhile, body parts have been found on a pig farm, and a pub landlord is long long since missing.

How does it all tie together? But yep, it does. Grace sets up two separate investigative teams; when the penny drops and he realises the connection, the whiteboards are symbolically rolled together. It’s gripping TV – and it comes down in the end to the most tragic and basic of emotions, a bereft dad’s inexpressible grief and a grieving daughter’s quest for vengeance. It’s that rawness at the heart of it all which gives Grace its power. And then, once again, even when it’s over, it absolutely isn’t over. We relax – and then the double whammy. The perfect – and perfectly infuriating – conclusion to a superb series. No wonder Peter James, who created Grace across a hugely successful series of novels, is so delighted with the TV adaptations. They really have done him proud.