Business As Usual

Last week, there was a ‘Dallas’ joke.

This week, a ‘Derry Girls’ joke.

However ‘Blue Lights’ remained no laughing matter as the show reached the penultimate episode of its fourth series.

Before we get into that.. well, you know the drill by now.

Don’t give away any plot spoilers from the remainder of the fourth series in the comments section if you’ve seen it all on the iPlayer.

Please also bear in mind that this review will inevitably contain plot spoilers from previous series and episodes.

So if you haven’t watched them yet, maybe park reading this until you’ve caught up.

(SPOILERS ALERT!!!)

After last week’s flashback episode revealed Constable Gerry Cliff had compiled a dossier about the running of informers inside the McIntyre gang and also on the willingness of the security services to overlook their crimes, this week’s instalment began with Constables Annie Conlon and Grace Ellis playing ‘Would You Rather?..’ as they kept an eye on the migrant centre.

Grace and Annie’s game was interrupted, however, when a car pulled up outside the centre and an unidentified man opened the boot and hovered around it suspiciously.

Going with her gut that it just didn’t feel right, Grace sounded their car’s siren and sped towards his vehicle only to find the man was wearing a mask and holding a petrol bomb.

Throwing it at them, he fled on foot as Grace smashed into the car.

After checking they were okay, Grace radioed for backup as Annie chased him up an alleyway.

However he was nowhere to be seen.

Picking her way carefully through the alley, Annie was attacked from behind after the masked man emerged from someone’s back yard.

He delivered a blow to her stomach and delivered more blows as she lay on the ground and fought back.

As they wrestled, Annie did manage to gouge his right eye.

Groaning with pain, her attacker fled the scene.

As her PSNI colleagues struggled to handle this incident, Sergeant Sandra Cliff was at home, trying to make sense of the collapse of the court case against Mo McIntyre and Anto Donovan for common enterprise in the murder of her husband.

Turning to Gerry’s dossier for answers, she summoned former colleague turned lawyer Jen Robinson for help.

Before Jen arrived, Inspector Helen McNally turned up on Sandra’s doorstep to sympathise with her about the collapse of the case.

But despite her protestations that she had no knowledge why the case against was withdrawn, Helen was met with a frosty reception.

At the McIntyres’ house, Tina cooked a fry for her son Mo who asked her what the collapse of the case meant for them.

“We just get on with it,” she told him, explaining the ending of the trial would lead to his father being released soon from jail.

Then they’d have decisions to make about potentially moving abroad.

“It’ll blow over like it always does,” Tina added.

Helen returned to Blackthorn for a meeting with her boss Chief Superintendent Nicola Robinson to discuss what happened in the Cliff case.

Explaining the trial risked exposing an intelligence asset, the Chief Superintendent heaped even more pressure on her colleague by telling Helen that she was about to receive an email about the fate of Blackthorn.

As she processed the news, Annie and Grace picked Colly’s brains about who the masked man at the migrant centre might have been, asking for his thoughts.

This prompted a classic Colly retort.

“I’m Special Branch. If I told you all my thoughts I would be Ordinary Branch. Wouldn’t I?”

As Sandra pressed her for some insight on Gerry’s files, Jen was reluctant to get involved because of her mum Nicola’s signature being on some of the documents.

Appealing to Jen’s good nature, Sandra observed that Gerry was driven mad by intelligence chiefs putting their own needs first and turning a blind eye to the criminal activities of the McIntyres and the Dublin based Ginley gang.

That swung it for Jen.

With Jonty Johnson also turning up on Sandra’s door, it was clear she meant business about exposing the McIntyres.

Would Sandra persuade Jonty to join them and be able to expose the activities of the “sneaky beakies,” as her husband used to call military intelligence?

With Ginley gang associate Dana Morgan piling pressure on Tina to keep the flow of drugs going from Dublin to Belfast to Britain, would her eagerness to take risks lead to their criminal activities being exposed?

And with Helen deciding to bin her drive to tackle low level crime, declaring it was back to “business as usual” for her officers, was that a signal Blackthorn would close?

Penned by the actress Bronagh Taggart of ‘The Fall’ and ‘How To Get To Heaven From Belfast‘ fame, this episode accelerated the sense from last week’s instalment that ‘Blue Lights’ creators Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson are bringing to a conclusion the show’s principal storyline about the McIntyres and the impact of past policing on the present.

That determination, however, to end that plotline is not without its risks.

Because while audiences outside Northern Ireland might swallow a neat wrapping up of the story, local audiences might not be as forgiving.

So depending on your perspective, the dossier storyline will either be interpreted as gripping or completely Scooby Doo.

Ultimately Episode Six will determine which audience has the most sway with the writers.

However if you were putting money on it, it would have to be on satisfying the non Northern Irish audience.

What most people should be able to agree on is that Andi Osho has had a very good series as Sandra Cliff.

Sian Brooke, Frank Blake, Joanne Crawford. Katherine Devlin, Nathan Braniff, Dearbhaile McKinney, Michael Smiley, Andrea Irvine, Seamus O’Hara and Abigail McGibbon have all been pretty solid.

However for two series Martin McCann has felt a little bit wasted like a decent Premier League striker being relegated to the bench for 80 minutes.

Keeping him back at base in Blackthorn as Acting Skipper has felt like a waste of his talent when it would have been fun to see his character Stevie Neil back on the streets, just cutting loose.

The return of Hannah McClean and Jonathan Harden as Jen and Jonty has worked well.

Cathy Tyson, though, has been saddled for two series with a one dimensional part as the drug kingpin Dana Morgan and poor old Tabitha Smyth has suffered a similar fate as the vlogger Katie Close.

There was one delicious piece of casting this week, with the appearance of Paul Mallon as a friend of Grace’s who did detective training with her.

“This is Dennis,” Grace explained, without delivering a knowing wink to camera.

Ardent ‘Derry Girls’ fans will know Mallon’s character in Lisa McGee’s sitcom was Dennis, the unhinged shopkeeper.

With Patterson, Lawn and Taggart holding out the possibility that next week’s episode of ‘Blue Lights’ might well be its last, fans of the show might be forgiven for going into a Dennis the Shopkeeper-style rant if that actually turns out to be the case.

(Series Four, Episode Five of ‘Blue Lights’ was broadcast on BBC1 on October 27th, 2026 with all episodes available on the BBC iPlayer)