Bodyguard: That huge twist in episode 4 threatens to strip the show of its best elements

Turning the show from an intriguing character study into a more straightforward whodunnit

(BBC)

*This article contains major spoilers for Bodyguard series 1 episode 4, if you've yet to watch it please click away now*

The BBC’s Bodyguard series killed off its deuteragonist on Sunday night not with a gasp but a shrug. We’ve come to expect gory emphasis when main characters make a surprise early exit in our TV shows – a plot device we might call Ned Starking – so it was unusual and skilful how creator Jed Mercurio unceremoniously axed The Right Honourable Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes) in episode four.

The home secretary was largely obscured by smoke during the St Matthew’s College blast the previous week, and the lack of viscera or halting final words, uttered while she was cradled in Budd’s arms amid the debris, led us all to assume that Montague would live to govern another day. Mercurio had Hawes’s character Lindsay Denton shot dead in an industrial facility in his previous show, Line of Duty; surely he wouldn’t write the acclaimed actor out again?

With a grim shake of the head from a surgeon, however, she was pronounced dead midway through the bombing’s fallout episode – a rare bit of realism for television drama, which generally wouldn’t do something as uncinematic as have a characters die in hospital from their injuries.

It was an interesting spin on a narrative twist that’s very fashionable at the moment, but a risky one. Audiences tend to initially delight in these game-changing moments, but fans loyal to Bodyguard may grow to miss Montague.

It was the relationship between the home secretary and PPO Sergeant David Budd (Richard Madden) that made the show take flight in its second episode. This seemed to be not so much a TV procedural (and, boy, have we had our fair share of those in the UK) but a character study that would explore how automaton politicians need intimacy just like the rest of us, and how men will put aside even seismic ideological differences in the interests of getting laid.

The loss of the Budd-Montague dynamic will also be felt just in terms of action and suspense. The show’s opening train terrorist attack sequence felt pretty stock to me, but it was the sniper scene that came once Montague was in play that won Bodyguard my unfailing weekly viewing.

Decorated with blood even more liberally than a saloon in a Tarantino film, the interior of the home secretary’s flashy chauffeured car was a brilliant location for a shootout. Bullets peppered its armour plated chassis, as Montague was reduced from icy politician to terrified mortal and Budd tried to MacGyver his way out of the assassination attempt, using his iPhone’s selfie camera to locate the gunman.

But Budd’s days securing his “principal” on the streets and servicing her in the sheets are over. This leaves us with... a whodunnit? That’s if episode four is anything to go by, which was largely concerned with establishing the suspects behind the bombing, a list you might struggle to recount.

Let’s see. There’s PR advisor Tahir Mahmood. More general advisor Rob...MacDonald, is it? What about that bloke from W1A? Or one of the other middle-aged meeting room-lurkers? Oh and wait, there’s a mystery man named Longcross? These characters aren’t really familiar enough yet for the viewer to particularly care who is pulling the strings, and with only two episodes to go it’s unlikely they ever will be. There is an enjoyment to be found in how open the playing field is, I suppose (at this point literally anyone could be responsible), but I’m not sure it’s a game I even want to be playing.

(BBC)

With Hawes out the picture, the show’s sense of drama now rests on Madden’s shoulders. I’m still confident he can carry us through to a satisfying climax, although if he turns out to be completely innocent Bodyguard is going to have to go some way in explaining why he is currently acting so guilty. That it’s taking police this long to both ID sniper Andy Apsted and place him in a pub with Budd only a few days before the assassination attempt should be of concern to the in-show public when the CCTV image finally comes out.

This is all to assume, of course, that Montague is actually dead.

Shows about conspiracies invite ones of their own; perhaps Mercurio has set up an elaborate fake death unbeknownst to viewers? This theory has found sympathy with viewers who see Romeo and Juliet everywhere in the show, from Montague’s surname to the apparent rose in Budd’s, the claim being that David falsely believes Julia is dead the same way Romeo did his lover.

Indeed, with no shot of Montague’s corpse and no watery-eyed, stiff upper-lipped morgue scene, I wouldn’t put it past Bodyguard to not only pull the rug from under us but subsequently take up the floorboards too.

Bodyguard continues Sunday night at 9pm on BBC One. You can catch up on iPlayer here.