The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / Spiral dénouement…spoilers, probablement…

Spiral dénouement…spoilers, probablement…

by 21 Comments

Phew. Putain. Need a coup. What do we think? Probably spoilers within.

0

Comments

  1. Need to process it, but I wondered up to the last second whether someone would stab Laure or something. I was betting on Gilou catching a bullet in the final shootout but it was nice to see Beckriche grow a pair and do something useful. Vargas turns out to be as dodgy as his beard but Judge Lucie comes through, though to the end I missed Roban and hoped he’d reappear in some game changing move. I hate to think of him alone in his old guy cardigan in his apartment. Seeing Josephine and Laure/Gilou have a happy ending gave a totally unexpected warm glow to the end. I’ll rewatch the whole thing at some point but a very satisfying and not grim ending which frankly I could do without at the moment but which wouldn’t have been unexpected.

  3. I was also convinced that someone was going to come to a horrible end, and relieved they didn’t. Those last episodes were incredibly tense. Kudos to a series that managed to get through eight series without going bad – it kept up the quality right to the end. That said, they did twist the characters’ behaviour a tad implausibly in this series I thought – Laure and Gilou retiring into a romcom misty future; Josephine suddenly becoming a caring Lone Ranger for illegal immigrants – really?

    A word for Edelman, who saved the day and increasingly became one of my favourite characters. Enjoyed Ali as well, and I too wondered if there might be a spin-off – Laure does say that she’s glad he’s sticking around as the team will need him.

    Wonderful stuff – one of the great cop series.

  4. I have really enjoyed my Spiral fix over the last 5 weeks, but like @blue-boy I think that it did become a bit implausible at the end.

    Two things in particular:

    1. the shoot out involving Titi in the car park of the drug raid hotel was all a bit Hollywood… surely Armed Response would have shot him way before he was eventually arrested?

    2. Surely the team would have phoned ahead and got local plod to (unobtrusively) seal off the end of the road leading to the house where Cisco was holed up with Gilou as soon as they had realised that Laure was on her way there, thus preventing Laure from ever getting near the house?

    That said, I did really enjoy this series. Luckily, because I have only ever seen Spirals 4 (I think) and 7 before, I still have five more to watch from scratch.

  5. I’m not sure how I’m going to cope now that it’s finished, watch it all over again perhaps.

    I thought the ending was great, very romcom I know, but it left us with that uncertainty about whether Laure & Gilou would really be happy without the police. Has she really mellowed enough ?

    In some ways I thought season 8 was the weakest one. The Cisco gang seemed a little thick and too credible, Titi a spoilt child, but the tension in the relationship between Laure & Gilou was well done and Ali was a great character. I wouldn’t have been sorry if it had ended with season 7.

    One of the best t.v dramas ever, you care and worry about the characters.

    Just one point puzzled me. Did JP say anything other than “affirmative” ?

  6. Wow! Tension and tenderness, and I love a happy ending, moi. (Stoppit, Moose!)

    I missed Roban, but Judge Lucie was a welcome distraction, and Joséphine’s discovery of her caring side was heartwarming. I’d agree that the car park shootout was overblown, but the uncertainty over the final outcome kept me riveted.

    I’ve been rewatching the whole lot from the beginning in tandem with this last series – currently on series 5, with Gilou about to fall for Cindy. What’s been especially interesting is what I’d forgotten or misremembered – I was convinced that Pierre had been stabbed by his client rather than shot by a panicking guard. And I’d not previously noticed that Gilou’s surname changed between series 1 and 2. Was some M. Gilles Lemaire outraged at constantly being mistaken for a hard-bitten, rule bending, coke addicted keuf?

    • Yes, the tenderness. I admit to having had a spec of dust in my eye when Laure teared-up, saying that she could not be part of the team that would arrest Gilou.

  7. That was not the ending I was expecting. I had said to my wife there is no way this can have a good ending. So I was reasonably surprised. They didn’t have to contort the plot implausibly to get to that happy ending.

    I thought most likely was a dead Gilou cradled by a weeping Laure; second most likely was the reverse scenario; third was both of them dead, with Beckriche and Bremont standing over them.

    I forgot about running a week by week review until we were halfway through, by which time there was too much to discuss.

    I was surprised that, when in prison, Gilou was in general population and not in secure custody. Don’t French criminals like to beat-up/kill any coppers that they come across in prison?

    Josephine has turned into a saint. Not only is she helping kids, but they are clients who can’t pay.

    The judiciary were more the most part even more weaselly than when we had Roban as the sole investigating magistrate who had any idea of how police operations worked, and not everything can be done by the book.

    With resect to @Pajp and whether they would have phoned ahead – had they done so any chance of extracting Gilou without hime being seen would have gone.

    There are many more points, but for the moment that is it, other than to say I’m saddened that there is no more Engrenages to look forward to. 😢

    • Wasn’t the point that the local administration had no knowledge of Gilou at all and couldn’t have, so they couldn’t phone ahead. Which is why he walked away – no one knew he was involved who would be looking.

      • Yes, that amplifies the point I was making.

        On Gilou’s location, I was surprised that Cisco let the nosy neighbour go. He was already aware that he was in the news and surely wouldn’t have risked the neighbour seeing his face flashed up on a TV screen.

    • Yes, I suppose so @carl

      I had taken it that Beckriche wanted the team to arrest Gilou, as opposed to anyone else, because it was, in some senses, the “proper” or “respectful” thing to do. At the time, they would not have known that things would pan out in a way that would allow Gilou to walk.

      I do, however, accept that they might have had thoughts that they could extract Gilou without anyone else knowing.

      • That is also a very valid point.
        As the script panned pout, the scriptwriters had to make sure that Gilou could walk away so that we could enjoy that final scene with Laure.

  8. As others have said, a happier ending than expected. None the worse for that though.

    I like the way that the characters continued to develop. Edelman, from being somewhat ambiguous, turned out to be a good egg. As well as the most French-looking man, ever.

    I’m wondering what the actor who plays Nico did to blot his copybook – from a fairly big role last season, to no lines whatsoever this one. Not one.

    • Agree re: the most French-looking man, ever. I wondered how he always seems to have the same length of stubble. Maybe he has a 2mm guard on his electric shaver.

  9. The last episode was spoiled for me, too, by the absolute certainty that one of the leads was gong to get a bullet, right up to the last blurred second. Glad they didn’t, thoughbut. A good surprise.

    The weakest of the series, but still a good watch. The Karlsson/Lola subplot was largely a waste of time, and what little that happened should have happened in the last series. Karlsson seemed to get less convincing as the story played out – I know the idea was to show her “warm, human, vulnerable” side – but who cares about that?

    A big missing this series was the off-plot chat between the team members, the little asides that build character and relationships and make situations real. The dialogue was all “on the nose” and relied too much on exposition. In particular, the very last lines between Laure and Gilou were clumsy to the point of bathos – “so – are you still going to resign?” etc.

    Too many scenes relying on orders being given and then ignored for artificial dramatic effect. I don’t know if this was written by the same writer as previous series, but there was a distinct drop-off in quality.

    And too many moments when I couldn’t suspend disbelief, the worst being when Gilou and the underwhelming Cisco (why were we supposed to be scared of him, again?) were holed up together at the end – why didn’t Gilou just bang him on the head, tie him up and walk away?

    Edelman was great, Gilou was great, and the Big Story was fine, but the weak elements had to be forgiven, unlike all the previous series.

    Greatest police series ever, though. And I think increased love for France and the French in unexpected ways.

Leave a Reply