Goodbye, pet: TV’s iconic detective gets the ending she deserves
Vera ★★★★
It is always a bit sad watching the finale of a much-loved series. But the sadness can often be tinged with another emotion – concern. Are the producers going to ruin it by failing to come up with a fitting finale, by, say, reviving a dead character and crediting God (Battlestar Galactica)? Killing off the demon hordes too soon and rushing through a myriad of unsatisfying character resolutions (Game of Thrones)? Massacring the major characters in a bloodbath (Blake’s 7)? Or simply baffling the heck out of everyone (The Sopranos)?
Brenda Blethyn as DCI Vera Stanhope and David Leon as DI Joe Ashworth.
This two-part finale of Vera, the bleak northern English detective drama, after 14 seasons was a major event in Britain. Star Brenda Blethyn did the talk shows and even a documentary, Vera, Farewell Pet, which looked back over her iconic detective and included an interview with Ann Cleeves, who wrote the novels upon which the drama was originally based.
If anything, this two-part special underplays it, and is all the stronger for it.
For those unfamiliar, each 90-minute episode is set in the starkly beautiful county of Northumberland and city of Newcastle, as the frequently cantankerous Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope and her team peel away layers of mystery surrounding a local murder before unmasking the often surprising culprit.
I realise this sounds formulaic and doesn’t explain why I find the series so enjoyable.
Brenda Blethyn in a scene from the final season of Vera.Credit: Helen Williams
Yes, the Oscar-nominated Blethyn turned her detective into a TV icon, with signature rain Mackintosh and bucket hat, gruff manner and inability to express emotions towards her police team, realised by a talented supporting cast.
British network ITV deployed the wild beauty of northern England near the Scottish border to full effect, aided by a score of mournful flute and strings.
The series became embedded in the culture, even Shaun Micallef parodied it (“Kenny!”), while a knitting pattern for a Vera doll, complete with dishevelled brown hair, crumpled bucket hat and that rain Mackintosh, can be bought online.
The show stuck resolutely to its formula but was never formulaic, such was the quality of the material and its artistic convictions, which sometimes masked the fact that the revelation of the killer wasn’t always the most logically consistent or emotionally robust.
In these final episodes, Stanhope is offered a promotion, while her friendship with her loyal 2IC Detective Inspector Joe Ashworth (David Leon) is under strain.
The murder of a student and disappearance of a teenage girl from a residential care home force Stanhope into an unwelcome re-examination of her fraught relationship with her father, told in convincing flashbacks.
It is something of an end for Stanhope, but also a new beginning, as a final scene hints at Vera’s future in a way that feels utterly right. In the end, these episodes are neither the best nor the worse the series has offered us since 2011.
So Vera is gone. But one of the delights of being a TV watcher in your middle years is that the memory fades. There is a certain pleasure in turning on an old episode of Vera to realise that not only have I watched it before, but also that because I can’t for the life of me remember whodunit, I can enjoy it all over again.
The final season of Vera airs over two nights, on April 26-27, at 7.30pm on the ABC.
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