The Missing (BBC One, Tuesday) was never going to have a happy ending. After eight emotionally exhausting, clue-dangling weeks of James Nesbitt's face crumpled in a rictus of pain and anger, his brow wasn't going to unfurrow into a beaming smile. The missing child, Olly, now a teenager, wasn't going to run into the arms of his exhausted but happy parents, Tony (Nesbitt) and Emily (Frances O'Connor), in the dreary French town. Still, I didn't expect the final episode to be such a mixture of neat endings and open-ended misery.
So, spoiler alert: early in the episode there's a deathbed confession – a little disappointingly in a plot that has fizzed with surprising twists – with our sleuths Tony, Emily, Julien Baptiste, the French policeman, and Mark Walsh, the British liaison officer crowding around the hospital bed like the gang from Scooby Doo.
The hotel owner, whom we didn’t much notice until last week’s clue, admits that while drunk driving he knocked down the boy, who had simply wandered away from his father. Panicking, he enlisted the help of his brother, the dodgy magistrate and now mayor (and my prime suspect), to dispose of the body.
Simple as that. The six-year-old wasn’t abducted by a Romanian trafficking gang or the local paedophile ring – parents’ fantastical fears are rarely realised; danger is more prosaic than that. Tony and Emily hadn’t killed him, and neither had Mark. But the compelling strength of this taut thriller was that, right up to the end, they all seemed viable scenarios.
And then, once the whodunnit is out of the way, the loose ends are tied up. There are two suicides, of the mayor and the young French paedophile. Emily and Mark get married. Baptiste has a lovely family reunion.
But before things get too tidy there's a challenging ending with a powerful emotional punch. The man in the brief opening scene trudging through the snow in Russia – The Missing is a time-shift drama, but Russia? That was a surprise – is revealed to be a deranged Tony, frozen in every way, still searching years later, with no closure, as the child's body was never found.
It isn’t a satisfying ending to a drama – but it couldn’t have been, given the devastatingly sad scenario of a missing child and the grim criminal realities and perversities of human nature, as laid out over the past eight weeks.
And then a very pleased-sounding BBC continuity person – this has been one of the TV hits of the year – announces a second series of The Missing, and my heart sinks.
We've been here before. The first series of The Fall (RTÉ One Wednesday; BBC One, Thursday) was a terrific psychological thriller, with an inventive structure – we knew who the killer was from the get-go – superb acting and fascinating central characters, in DI Stella Gibson (Gillan Anderson) and Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan). It was also a solid police procedural, so that when, in the final scene, Spector got away it felt wrong, explained not by the plot but by the announcement of a second series. And it happens again in the series-two finale.
Until last week's episode The Fall kept it together, a psychological cat-and-mouse game between two hunters, with Spector's manipulation of a young girl (a terrific performance by Aisling Franciosi) revealing insights into his twisted character. And then this week's feature-length finale – a half-hour too long – is set mostly in the police station as Spector is questioned.
The wordy interactions between Spector and Gibson show how similar they are, and how damaged she is beneath the icy, controlled exterior. But it is vaguely soporific, with all the key characters by now adopting Stella’s perplexingly slow and low, almost whispery way of talking.
Even the search in the forest, as Gibson walks dreamily alone (without hordes of uniformed cops beside her – one of the many unlikely scenes in this episode), and the discovery of Spector’s last victim alive, are anticlimactic.
And the end? The local paramilitary nutter shoots Spector and Gibson’s hot copper colleague – he didn’t have much point other than his attractiveness – and she runs to the bleeding pair. It’s her dream lover, Spector, whom she cradles in her arms rather than her colleague and actual lover. And, damn it, Spector’s not even dead, raising the spectre of series three.
As lovely as Dornan is to watch, as strong as the characters have been, and as clever the plot twists have been, here is one small Christmas wish for The Fall: let Paul Spector die.
When James Joyce, who we've heard rather a lot about, published Ulysses, in Paris in the 1920s, the Irishwoman Eileen Gray was causing a storm in the design world there. Gray had her own fashionable shop showing her inventive work. She appeared in the top design journals, as well as in Vogue, and by the time she died, aged 98, she was regarded as the mother of modernism (with Le Corbusier its father).
According to one of the many learned and passionate contributors to the excellent, almost academic documentary Gray Matters (RTÉ One, Monday), "modern" tends to mean "of the moment". Gray, in her furniture design and architecture, anticipated the future. Everything we hear and see in this film points towards her genius and vision.
Mary McGuckian, who narrates the programme as well as producing it, grabs the attention early by focusing on the day in 2009 when one of Gray’s works, the Dragon Chair – slightly battered, eccentric and unique – sold for €22 million, becoming one of the most expensive pieces of 20th-century design ever auctioned. Gray would have been embarrassed. One of her friends – hearing from people who knew her is one of the documentary’s strengths – says she placed little monetary value on her work.
This film is mostly about that work. Few details are given about Gray’s personal life, which is a pity, although she was intensely private, so maybe that’s as it should be.
Tellingly, underlining the truth that the Wexford-born designer never really got her due from her own country while she was alive, all bar one of the Gray experts interviewed are French or American.
Ones to Watch: make or break time
Unbreakable (RTÉ One, Monday) tells the inspirational story of Mark Pollock's strength and positivity in the face of incredible obstacles . Pollock (right) lost his sight at 22, became the first blind person to race to the South Pole and then, four weeks before his wedding, was paralysed from the waist down.
In Homeland (RTÉ2, Tuesday), the finale of a terrific and thrilling series, the links between Pakistan officials and the Taliban are now known to Carrie, who is racing to pull Quinn out of there.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
