Spiral season 8 review – the final autopsy

It was all smiles in the end, but, Mon Dieu, they put us through the wringer first.

Season 8 of Spiral was every bit as special as it had to be, bringing to an end one of the finest police series ever made. And it’s French – a production of Canal + in association with BBC 4. Who would have thought it? Now it’s time they took a bow.

If you haven’t watched all ten episodes of the show (available now on BBC iPlayer, in French but with subtitles in English), you should stop reading now – unless, of course, you’re not interested in what happened to Laure, Gilou, Ali, Joséphine, Edelman, Beckriche and the rest. In that event, your only excuse is that once offered by Dr Johnson when asked why one of his dictionary definitions was less than entirely accurate: “ignorance, pure ignorance”.

The good news is two-fold. Laure (Caroline Proust – no relation), who heads the extremely serious crime squad at the heart of the story, finally gets together with Gilou (Thierry Godard), her suavely dishevelled number two, whom we last saw being locked in klink after going just a little too far with his definition of self-interested police work. And Joséphine (Audrey Fleurot), the splendid, red-headed defence lawyer who may, just, have lightly murdered her boss after he raped her in Season 6, ends up in a smooch with the wily, ever dependable Edelman (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) – a legal gun for hire if ever there was one, who has got her out of one scrape after another and finally reaps his reward.

At one point, very near the end of the last episode, it looks as if Gilou – whose ambiguous role in an armed robbery is airbrushed out of the record when the team shoots dead the only villain left standing who could have identified him – actually walks into the sunset. But then, in the one scene in the entire run that could have been lifted from Emily in Paris, he and Laure are seen spinning round in each other’s arms amid a crowd outside a Metro station. Cue credits. Truly, a Kleenex moment.

Sadly, my favourite character, Arnaud Beckriche, the pins-on-the-board Commissaire in overall charge of operations, fails to secure the hand of the young and fetching investigating magistrate, Lucie Bourdieu (Clara Bonnet). Lucie began the season putting him in his place at every turn only to end up in bed with him, putting both of them in the invidious position that was on the cards from episode one. She chooses career over amour in the end though, leaving the poor fellow desolate, wondering why bending the rules seems to work for everybody except him. If only there was a season 9, I’m sure love would find a way.

As noted, Joséphine, a flame-haired temptress to the manor born, finally accepts what has been obvious to the rest of us for some time, that in a wicked world Edelman is to be her one true love. But it is her late-onset decency, in defence of a 13-year-old Moroccan tearaway, whom she has been representing to all and sundry, few of whom care, that has us reaching for a whole bunch of mouchoirs. The boy, Souleymane (Ayoube Barboucha), has been dumped on so regularly by the bad guys that it is a wonder he can still stand. But when he is finally murdered and Joséphine weeps over his body, we are, I am not ashamed to say, moved beyond words.

The plot of season 8 is far from incidental. It is complex, convoluted and conspiratorial. There are sub-plots and sub-plots within sub-plots. Yet it never loses us. Hollywood cop shows could learn from Spiral that it is possible to be complicated without losing your audience. All that’s needed are story lines we care about and a good editor who ties them all together.

Anyway, what happens in season 8 is that Laure’s crew, on probation after the rule-bending season 7 that concludes with Gilou taking one for the team, are tasked with investigating the murder of another Moroccan boy caught on video going at it hammer and tongs with Souleymane. It looks like an open and shut case: find the boy and get him to court. Needless to say, nothing is what it seems. Before you know it, we are deep into the show’s familiar territory – drugs, brutality, prostitution and child-trafficking – as ever without so much as a whiff of the Eiffel Tower, though at one point featuring a snapped view of the Arc de Triomphe. Gilou, presented to us not as a tortured soul but as a good man forced by circumstances to don his iron glove when needs must, is released from jail to infiltrate a criminal gang led by the odious, but strangely likeable, Cisco (Kool Shen) and his even more ghastly son, Tito (Pierre Caveur). The pair, in the midst of a cash crisis, decide that the way forward is to steal, simultaneously, from a drug lord and his Mr Big buyer.

It all goes hideously wrong, of course. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. Gilou is fatally compromised (again), Laure is forced to do the wrong thing for the right reason (again), Beckriche is obliged to loosen his tie and get down and dirty with the lads, and Ali, Laure’s acting second-in command, who has been persuaded to join a rival unit, ends up going along with the prevailing ethos that whatever works works, even coming up with a few refinements of his own. The result? Case closed and surviving bad guys on their way to the slammer. The difference this time is that with the end in sight, we, as the long-suffering viewers, perched on the edges of our sofas, have to be offered closure. Which we are. Even as the forensic team turn up in their bunny suits to wheel off the bodies, there is a palpable atmosphere of, the Hell with City Hall, when you need a job done who you gonna call?

I haven’t had time to mourn the departure of old favourites who got pensioned off after Season 7. These include the lugubrious, infinitely flexible Judge, François Roban (Philippe Duclos); the do-it-by-the-book (please!) team stalwart “Tintin” (Fred Bianconi), who departs from the rule book only under protest; and Beckriche’s slightly dodgy predecessor, Commissaire Herville (Nicolas Briançon), who soldiered through 49 episodes before being gunned down in a Chinese restaurant.

And I haven’t even mentioned Commissaire Brémont (Bruno Debrandt), Laure’s much put-upon ex and the father of their child, who deals with the fact that Laure and Gilou are plainly an item with what you’d have to call admirable sang froid. I will even spare a tear for Brémont’s newly appointed investigating magistrate, the 17-year-old Judge Vargas (Sébastien Chassagne), always ready to do what has to be done so long as it benefits his career. We have all met a Vargas and hope not to meet him again.

And there you have it: sustained brilliance for eight years, knocking Bosch and Line of Duty into a cocked hat. Chapeaux to the production team, directors, camera crew and writers, all too numerous to mention. They did us proud. and three cheers for Paris, revealed to us as a real city, not a travel-guide confection. As for Laure and Gilou, I shall miss them like family. Joséphine and Edelan, too. And le pauvre Commissaire Beckriche. It’s just not fair. Hand me the Kleenex.