Bodyguard, episode 4 review: this thriller is inconsistent but ludicrously addictive
No doubt about it. For sheer, unmitigated nerve-shredding action and suspense Bodyguard (BBC One) has delivered more bang for our TV licence buck than any other drama this year. And so it continued last night with another episode that delivered a genuinely heart-thumping surprise and wrong-footed viewer expectations at just about every turn.
Last week’s ending was shocking enough when, despite the best efforts of her (very) close protection officer David Budd (Richard Madden), a bomb went off during Home Secretary Julia Montague’s (Keeley Hawes) speech, leaving her life hanging in the balance.
And there it remained for much of this fourth episode while the police and security services embarked on yet another under-resourced investigation while clues were scattered in every conceivable direction as to who could be responsible.
From the outset, implausibility has threatened to undo Bodyguard: whether it was Budd’s PTSD going unnoticed, the police’s inability to identify a highly identifiable assassin or, above all, the unlikely sexual relationship between Budd and Montague. But then these are the buzz factors that have also made the series into such a conversation piece, and Jed Mercurio’s script has been fleet-footed enough to lead us away from the danger zone of total incredulity, piling on the action wherever necessary to distract us from more obvious plot holes.
He did so again here, delivering a knockout emotional punch midway through, with the news that Montague had died. It was if the world had fallen in. Where could we possibly go now that this key character, focus of so much background plotting and the drama’s core relationship, was no more?
There was only one way: back to Budd and the possibility that rather than being a security risk himself, he could be set up as a fall guy by the security services. Whether this seismic shift from a conspiracy thriller to a murkier one-man-against-the-spooks drama will work remains uncertain. And some suicide-foiling shenanigans involving blank rounds in Budd’s gun and, clunkier still, Budd being called in to question the bomber he stopped in the series’ opening moments didn’t entirely convince.
But such inconsistencies haven’t yet stopped Bodyguard becoming the most ludicrously addictive drama of the year, because there’s always been something more compelling around the corner. And with two episodes still to go, that’s a lot of corners, and a lot of opportunities, for as skilled a hand as Mercurio’s to keep things racing breathlessly round.
