Line of Duty Season 3
Overview
It starts with a shooting. Sergeant Danny Waldron leads an armed unit into a raid and executes a suspect who had already surrendered — and then, minutes into AC-12's interview, before Steve Arnott has even got through his first question, Waldron is shot dead by one of his own team. What follows is the most tangled investigation Jed Mercurio had written up to that point, and that is saying something. Keeley Hawes returns as Lindsay Denton, out of prison and nursing a grudge she hides extremely well, while Craig Parkinson's Dot Cottan — the bent copper hiding inside AC-12 itself — runs out of room to wriggle. Martin Compston and Vicky McClure do career-best work here, especially McClure's Kate Fleming, undercover inside Waldron's old unit and lying to everyone, including you, about where her loyalties sit. The final episode is basically one feature-length interrogation cross-cut with a race against the clock, and people who've seen it describe it the way you'd describe a cup final. This is also the season that confirms Line of Duty isn't really a whodunit. It's a show about how corruption protects itself — patiently, from the inside.
