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Warning: contains spoilers
The ending of Kiri, Jack Thorne’s four part drama, has provoked an outcry that has become depressingly predictable. Viewers took out their frustration on social media at an ending which they felt fell spectacularly short of a resolution.
Characteristic rants included: “So angry about the ending #Kiri,” and “There was absolutely no justice! #Kiri.” Another harrumphed: “Sorry but that wasn’t actually an ending #Channel4 #Kiri LAME!”
The reason for this outpouring of ire was aimed at the conclusion which showed Kiri’s white foster father Jim (Steven Mackintosh) to be the last person to see her alive. He told his teenage son, Simon (Finn Bennett), that the young girl had slipped and hit her head on a rock. However, Jim had no other witnesses and it was implied that he had, in fact, done away with her – a revenge on what he felt was the telescopic philanthropy of his...
When all was said and done (or left undone), what was Kiri (Channel 4) finally about? At its most compellingly honest, it portrayed the impossible demands placed on social workers who stick plasters on the wounds of broken Britain. Whenever Sarah Lancashire’s embattled Miriam was on screen – lambasting her superiors, making peace with her mother, even at the vet’s – the focus sharpened, the stakes were higher, and all was well.
Miriam’s story had a beginning, a middle and an end. She alone was granted redemption, notwithstanding the irony that she had sent Kiri to the wrong home after all. Everyone else was left to battle for ownership of Kiri’s memory. The Akindeles were boxed into playing race politics in pursuit of justice, while the Warners were trapped in a dilemma from which there was no egress without mutually assured destruction.
It was a brave moment to drop the curtain, withholding the balm of a pat resolution. The gamble didn’t quite pay off. Take that police investigation. Kiri made scant pretence to be a procedural, but if this had been Line of Duty the absence of Kiri’s biological father Nate’s gold car from the vicinity of her home would have been discovered on CCTV before the next commercial break.
