Line of Duty series six best moments: Hastings’ speeches, ambushes, shoot-outs and everyone saying ‘CHIS’

AC-12 have done the gaffer proud this series - the sixth series of Line of Duty has been full of great moments
Line of Duty S6
Hastings and Steve: the golden boys of AC-12
BBC/World Productions

Don’t cry because it’s over, fella - smile because it happened.

This week the sixth series of Line of Duty comes to an end, after a heart-stopping succession of cliffhangers, revelations and Kate Fleming telling people to stop being tits. We still have a lot of questions about how it’s all going to pan out, but mainly we just don’t know how we’re going to cope on a Sunday night without our AC-12 faves.

To stop us feeling too bereft, we’re looking back on the best moments from a brilliant series as we await the finale this Sunday night.

Gail Vella pivots to podcasts

Ooh, modern. For the Gail Vella storyline, about a journalist who was killed after following a trail of institutional police corruption, Line of Duty pivoted to podcasts. Vella was working on a true crime series that was full of such juicy intel that not only was she murdered, but all of her notes and recordings were swiped by the culprit at the same time. Will the next series – if there is one – focus on a rogue TikTok creator? We pray.

The prison van ambush

Steve tries out for Bond
BBC/World Productions

Going to extreme lengths to discover what Gail Vella had been digging up for her true crime podcast, Steve made a visit to Blackthorn Prison, where he met up with Jimmy Lakewell, the corrupt solicitor who was revealed to be in league with the OCG’s balaclava men back in S4. Clearly taken aback by Jimmy’s sensational prison tan (weren’t we all?), Steve concocted a dramatic plan to bust his old foe out of jail, offering him immunity and a new life in witness protection in return for spilling to AC-12. The operation was going so well – until one of the OCG’s regulation issue black 4x4s rammed into the van carrying Jimmy and Steve, flipping it on its side. The resulting shootout between AC-12 and the OCG raised the nation’s blood pressure to frankly dangerous levels, and gave Martin Compston the chance to do his Bond audition when Steve saw off a sniper with one perfectly aimed shot.

Kate and Ryan Pilkington: guns at dawn (in a car park)

When you’re meant to be going to an All Bar One and a last-minute venue change sends you to a dodgy car park... it’s a red flag. And yet, if Kate hadn’t driven herself down there just after Carmichael had pulled AC-12’s surveillance on Ryan and Davidson, we wouldn’t have had the most riveting cliff-hanger of the season. Ryan pulled a gun on Kate, Kate pulled a gun on Ryan, Davidson watched on like a linesman who needs therapy. “ONE MORE CHANCE, RYAN! ONE MORE CHANCE!” shouted Kate, before two gunshots rang out and the credits rolled. We didn’t know who had died, but that ending left us 100% deceased.

The return of Patricia Carmichael

Line of Duty S6
Pass-agg Pat is back
BBC/World Productions

The opening bars of the Imperial March might as well have been blasted over the tannoy at AC-12 HQ when Hurricane Pat made her return. The human embodiment of passive-aggression strode into the office wearing a snazzy new roll neck jumper and a barely disguised smirk, before re-introducing herself. “For those of you who for whatever inexplicable reason don’t know, I’m Detective Chief Superintendent Patricia Carmichael,” she hissed. “I don’t mind ‘ma’am’ or ‘boss,’ not a big fan of ‘guvnor’ or ‘gaffer…’” Give Anna Maxwell Martin a Bafta for Best Supporting Annoyance.

Ryan’s watery detour

It’s been a real one for Ryan Pilkington
BBC/World Productions

OCG mole Ryan Pilkington established himself as public enemy number one in episode three. As if possessed by the spirit of legendary Corrie baddie Richard Hillman, he wrested control of the patrol car carrying suspect Terry Boyle to his accommodation, driving it straight into a nearby reservoir. In the nerve-shredding scene that followed, Ryan proceeded to drown his colleague PC Lisa Patel and tried to bump off Terry – only for Kate, who’d been tailing him on this watery detour, to arrive on the scene, putting the kibosh on his murder spree. Cue a bedraggled Kate making a sneaky phone call to Steve and rocking up at AC-12 HQ to spill her findings to her old colleagues.

‘When did we stop caring about honesty and integrity?’

Ted might have received his marching orders from DCC Andrea Wise in episode four, when he was told in no uncertain terms to take early retirement or risk a disciplinary process, but he wouldn’t go down without a fight. The gaffer inadvertently became a mouthpiece for the nation when he delivered an eviscerating takedown of systemic corruption, describing Chief Constable Philip Osborne (aka the one who tried to hush Steve up over the shooting of Karim Ali in S1) as “a bare-faced liar, promoted to our highest office,” before asking Wise: “When did we stop caring about honesty and integrity? That’s not a rhetorical question.” The Ted-isms have cranked up a gear this series, but this was a speech worthy of a standing ovation.

Jo Davidson’s DNA cliffhanger

Jo Davidson was born into the bent life
BBC/World Productions

In the first big cliffhanger of S6, Steve came over all Jeremy Kyle when he revealed that not only did the forensic team’s examination of Farida Jatri’s house discover Jo Davidson’s prints at the scene - they also found a close DNA match between Davidson and a “nominal” on the police database. It was a revelation dramatic enough to prompt this series’ very first “Mother of God!” from Ted - but fans had to wait a whole week to find out just who her mysterious blood relation was, giving wannabe detectives (yes, I’m talking about myself here) plenty of time to hash out theories connecting Davidson to the most minor of characters. We eventually discovered that Davidson was related to OG OCG man Tommy Hunter, who was killed off in S2 after a botched ambush. In a spectacularly grim turn of events, the ‘runs of homozygosity’ in her sample showed that she was both Tommy’s daughter and niece – which was news to Davidson, who learned the awful truth about her parentage in an AC-12 interrogation.

Marcus Thurwell is James Nesbitt with a tan

Sporting the kind of glow I haven’t been able to acquire since an all-inclusive week in Sharm el Sheikh in 2008, James Nesbitt popped up as bronzed expat and probable bent copper Marcus Thurwell. And oh, how he shone. As Steve Arnott clasped a printed out bit of paper bearing Nesbitt’s digitally de-aged face, we weren’t thinking about Thurwell’s likely OCG connections. We were just asking ourselves: spray or sun bed?

We all learned what a CHIS is

“Is the word CHIS in your vocabulary?” asked Davidson in an early episode. To which we answered: er... no. And yet, someone said the word ‘CHIS’ every thirty seconds in the first episode, so we had to learn quite quickly what it meant: Covert Human Intelligence Source. Annoyingly, by the time we had worked it out, the CHIS had fallen off of the top of a high-storey building. “Keep it on the DL. We’ve got a CHIS inside MIT,” Steve told Kate later on. We just went with it.

Cash in the attic

Steve thinking about driving to Liverpool
BBC/World Productions

After John Corbett’s widow Steph turned up at AC-12, badgering Ted about HMRC, Steve’s suspicions were raised – raised high enough, in fact, for him to make the not inconsiderable drive to Merseyside to check in on her, and pointedly refer to her nice telly and Sky Sports bundle. From then on, not even the prohibitive toll on the Mersey Gateway Bridge could keep Steve away from Steph. After one supremely awkward sleepover in the world’s narrowest bed, the waistcoated wonder seized the opportunity to carry out an impromptu search of his new love interest’s home, eventually chancing upon £50k of dodgy cash hidden in her attic – which just happened to be from the same batch as the notes recovered from Ted’s hotel room back in S5…

Steve finally gets that elusive promotion

Join the police force, they said. Steady career progression, good work-life balance, and no chance of getting hooked on over-the-counter painkillers after being chucked down multiple flights of stairs, they said. Finally, after almost a decade of dogged anti-corruption work (we won’t get into all the time he’s spent shagging witnesses and suspects), Steve Arnott is a DS no more, having been bumped up to acting DI by the gaffer. Undeserved promotions are rife in LoD’s Central Police (Superintendent Ian Buckells, anyone?), so it was nice to see Steve get his dues at long last.

Buckells’ police-themed sexts

Buckells deserves to be locked up for his sexts alone
BBC/World Productions

This year’s Line of Duty has made me scream several times. Shoot-outs, car chases, DNA revelations have all floored me. But I almost collapsed when, amid an AC-12 interrogation, DSU Ian Buckells was confronted with a PowerPoint display of the sexts he had sent to dodgy witness Deborah Devereux. Not only did the man have the horn in a big way, but he had the horn in a police-themed way.  “Anything you say will be taken down,” he wrote, to which Debs replied, “will u show me your trunshon”. (Bad spelling has ‘definately’ been a major theme this year.) Buckells, clearly a man with a lot to give, responded: “and my helmet”. Lock this man up for those sexts alone.

Line of Duty series six concludes on Sunday May 2 at 9pm on BBC One

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