So says Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison, in what not necessarily was intended as an in-joke reference to the actress playing her. (She said the same line in an earlier show.) Helen Mirren returns to her famous television character for perhaps last time in Prime Suspect - The Final Act (2006), a two-part, three-hour character drama / police procedural filmed immediately after her stellar and delicately contrasting work as Queen Elizabeths I (in a 2005 television miniseries) and II (in The Queen) so the inference of that line is unavoidable yet entirely appropriate.

Just the seventh Prime Suspect story since 1991, and only the second in the last decade (it's a shame they couldn't have made at least one annually), The Final Act is generally excellent and Mirren, not surprisingly, is superb. Its compelling mystery is, in some respects, a bit derivative of earlier Prime Suspect stories, but Frank Deasy's bleak teleplay ingeniously weaves elements of Jane Tennison's latest and last investigation directly and indirectly with its deeply troubled protagonist.

On the cusp of retirement, Jane leads the search for Sallie Sturdy, a missing 14-year-old girl early on presumed murdered. The girl clearly has fallen in with the wrong crowd, news to her frantic parents, Tony and Ruth (Gary Lewis and Katy Murphy), with Dad especially not handling the stress well at all. Meanwhile, Jane is drawn both professionally and personally to one of Sallie's classmates, Penny Philips (Laura Greenwood), a rebellious but obviously thoughtful and intelligent teenager in whom Jane sees more than a passing resemblance of her younger self.

Earlier Prime Suspects dealt with the rampant sexism Jane was up against in her department, and in her related failed romantic relationships with men. These elements are largely absent, taking a distant back seat to more serious and immediate problems: Jane's alcoholism, now at a point where it's beginning to interfere with her work and which completely dominates her personal life, and coming to grips with the mortality of her father, Arnold Tennison (Frank Finley), dying of cancer in a London hospital.

Jane's alcoholism is treated with unnerving, unflinching realism. Her self-inflicted black-outs are becoming known to her colleagues, who call her with case updates at night but which she forgets utterly by morning. During an interrogation, she accuses a suspect of being a heavy drinker because of the alcohol she smells on his breath, only to have him angrily correct her: that's Jane's boozy breath everyone in the room smells. She drives drunk, while on the case no less, and at one point, totally smashed, she climbs into her car and there's enormous tension whether she's going to try and drive in her condition because it's clear that if she does she'll probably kill someone, or herself.

Her relationship with her father, and her denial that he's going to die even after he's accepted it, is somewhat more conventional, but Deasy's script carefully integrates it and Jane's look back into her past (she spends time in her father's home, the place she grew up in) with her relationship with Penny. Indeed, the blurring of professional and personal lines between Jane and her troubles with Penny and the investigation is as deliberately disturbing and problematic as Jane's drinking.

Most poignantly, the pressures from her superiors to clean up her act lead to the show's most poignant moments while in a sense bringing the series full circle. At last compelled to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, she bumps into her former boss, retired Detective Superintendent Bill Otley (Tom Bell, of Prime Suspects 1 & 3), whom all those years ago had been her sexist nemesis. His surprising humility - and their shared experiences and addictions - is the heart of the show. Tom Bell the actor died just days before the show premiered and indeed on camera he looks like a dying man. Mirren and the crew must have at least suspected this and in any case Bell's condition inadvertently adds to the emotion of his scenes with Mirren.

(Ironically, Frank Finley's spot-on performance aside, he's positively robust at 80, a complete contrast to Bell. Finley not only doesn't physically look ill, though he suggests it in his performance, he almost looks like he could be Jane's husband as much as her father.)

Deasy likewise does a good job carrying over elements and atmosphere from earlier Prime Suspect shows, especially the blessing/curse of new technologies, from myriad surveillance cameras that are able to track one suspects movements all over London (a reference perhaps, to terrorism paranoia and privacy encroachments) to teenagers tied at the hip to their cell phones, blithely text messaging their pals even while being questioned by the police. Along similar lines and like earlier shows, working class London is seen as a hellish, apocalyptic place to live, especially for impressionable teens, one far removed from the gentrified tourist areas, a place of graffiti-ridden public housing, drugs, guns - the world of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange come to pass.

Holding it all together is Helen Mirren in another magnificent character study. In a refreshing contrast to the flip and/or self-righteous cops seen on many an American detective show, Mirren's Jane Tennison is intelligent but testy (bitchy isn't quite the right word), instinctive and methodical, austere yet lonely. Jane is one of TV's all-time great detectives and Mirren has given it one of the medium's most memorable performances, in large part because the character is at once so smart yet also so believably, unblinkingly flawed.

Video & Audio

Prime Suspect - The Final Act is presented in its original 16:9 format with widescreen enhancement. The image is strong throughout, and the slightly muted colors do justice to its fine cinematography. Unlike the earliest Prime Suspect DVDs, which unforgivably were cut American television versions (with profanity bleeped out) this DVD is unedited and wisely presented in its original two parts over two single-sided discs. The Dolby stereo mix is on par with 2006 standards but the disc has no subtitle options though the disc is close-captioned. Americans unacquainted with the more severe English and Scottish accents may strain to follow all the dialog.

Extra Features

The main supplement is an excellent 45-minute documentary on the entire Prime Suspect series, in 16:9 enhanced widescreen, that includes clips from earlier shows, and interviews with key actors, writers, producers, and the like, including Mirren. It's an enlightening show, particularly in detailing the development of the character and some of the devices Mirren used to bring verisimilitude to the Tennison: why she never folded her arms, why her character reaches out to touch her colleagues on the shoulder, etc.) The show is full of spoilers, and definitely should not be viewed until after viewing the main program. Fairly good cast filmographies and a photo gallery round out the package.

Parting Thoughts

Is this really the last Prime Suspect? The documentary seems to think so, though the door isn't entirely shut on another show down the road. If it does turn out to be the last, Prime Suspect - The Final Act says goodbye in a drama worthy of its fascinating leading character. Highly Recommended.

Film historian Stuart Galbraith IV's most recent essays appear in Criterion's new three-disc Seven Samurai DVD and BCI Eclipse's The Quiet Duel. His audio commentary for Invasion of Astro Monster is now available.