Closing credits

BBC1’s The Missing has been one of the undoubted TV highlights of 2016. Yet, even thrillers as overwhelmingly thrilling as this one have been known to blow it in the concluding episode, when the biggest revelation of the lot turns out to be that the writers couldn’t really answer all the questions that previous episodes had so intriguingly raised.

And of course, The Missing had raised more than most, with its fiendish plotting ranging across three timeframes — until last week, that is, when it added a fourth. So could Wednesday’s finale possibly avoid giving us that sense of outraged disappointment that comes from realising we’ve spent weeks looking forward to a full-scale solution that never quite comes? The answer, I’m happy to report, was a triumphant yes.

Admittedly, we’ve known since episode five who the main baddie was — which for some shows might have led to the rest of the series being an anti-climax. In this case, though, it was the first sign that Jack and Harry Williams’s script would be wise enough not to leave all explanations to the last minute, preferring to drip-feed us the information we craved in a way that combined satisfaction, shock and further tantalisation. It also meant that on Wednesday the remaining loose ends could be tied up without either rushing or cheating — and with just the right balance between excessive and insufficient neatness.

But if all this makes The Missing sound merely like a piece of precision engineering, that would be only half the story. The endless plot twists were always accompanied by a hugely affecting awareness of the emotional costs and ambiguities involved — even for the bad guys. On Wednesday, one of the people questioning the fantastically sinister Adam (Derek Riddell) took understandable offence at his references to himself and the young women he’d imprisoned as ‘a family’.