It's time to say goodbye to Hustle – but can you really trust them to leave?
That's it, then, the end of Hustle (BBC1) for ever. And the end of Mickey Bricks and the gang for ever, too – they're machine-gunned down by a bad man wearing black on a high London rooftop. Not the same high London rooftop where Sherlock met his end/not end the other day, but a similar one.
What goes wrong? Greed, I'm afraid (let that be a lesson to everyone). Mickey wants to do one very big job, and then retire to the Bahamas to play golf. So he targets Madani Wasem, a nasty piece of work from Bahrain, as the new mark. More of a bad stain than a mark, actually. They are going to relieve him of £10m.
And they do, too. It's a fabulous (and fabulously ludicrous) one to go out on, involving all their charm and cunning, fake offices, tapping into a fibre-optic cable to siphon off vast quantities of wonga, and even the return of former hustler Stacie Monroe.
It goes so well, until it goes so badly wrong. Wasem is on to them: he comes back with his "enforcer", the bad man in black. "Mickey Bricks, if you've ever been brilliant, please be brilliant now," says Emma. The situation is beyond even Mickey though. The enforcer fills them all with bullets: there's so much blood flying around, it looks like a scene from that tomato-throwing festival in Spain. That's it – they're all dead.
Oh, except suddenly they're not, they were just pretending to be dead. They lie very, very still until Wasem goes away, and then they get up again. Ha, they were just blanks, and blood capsules, and the "enforcer" turns out to be Danny Blue, back for the farewell party, too.
Hang on, that doesn't mean that they've left the door open, does it? That would be unwise. Hustle's been fun, but the fun has definitely worn thin now. Even this final series has felt a stretch. Any more would be breaking point.
I think it was better with them all dead. There was a nice finality about it. But perhaps we should have guessed. Rooftop deaths, they're never what they seem to be.