TV review: Broadchurch season two finale

The cast of Broadchurch series two.

* Warning: contains spoilers if you haven't seen last night's Broadchurch season two finale.

No doubt those who stuck with Broadchurch all the way through the maddening second series of the hit British crime drama were hoping that the finale might iron out the season's earlier unevenness. Maybe fill in a few holes in its plot logic too.

It wasn't to be. Broadchurch II ended with a double - or possible triple - clunk.

It came with a hasty resolve of the Sandbrook case, which hadn't really done enough to engage interest through the previous seven episodes. That was despite the toll, oh the toll, it had taken on Detective Inspector Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and which had caused to him to be transferred to Broadchurch in the first place.

There was the very guility Joe Miller being declared not guilty after the cheap-trick cliffhanger jury verdict announcement of the penultimate episode.

Then came Joe's banishment by the good folk of Broadchurch who stood around and watched him go, either too exhausted to form a decent lynch mob or looking artfully arranged for the cast publicity photos.

Yes, the officially innocent Joe Miller was sent to Coventry ... by being sent to Sheffield, the threats of his estranged wife about what she would do should he return, ringing in his ears.

Though you have to wonder that his acquittal was more to do with creating a bogeyman for future seasons - a Broadchurch III has been announced - and less to do with saying something about the flaws of adversarial British criminal justice system. Or what happens when crap lawyers take over a murder case which has rocked a tight-knit community.

As a courtroom drama, Broadchurch was pretty weak, the show cutting to the trial seemingly only when another net of red herrings was about to be dumped upon the case.

At least the final episode was relatively free of the rivalry between old legal foes Joceyln Knight (Charlotte Rampling) and Sharon Bishop (Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

The latter had spent the season delivering all her lines as if talking to a deaf elderly relative. Their scenes of mutual antipathy had become surplus to requirements many episodes earlier.

As there had been in earlier episodes, last night's finale came with moments where the acting saved the unlikeliness of the material.

Especially when Beth Latimer (Jodie Whittaker, terrific), flanked by husband Mark and Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman, also great) , finally confronted Joe Miller face-to-face in the clifftop cottage where he had killed her son. That rang true.

So did the scenes between the insufferable Hardy and the suffering Ellie Miller as they confronted the three arrested Sandbrook suspects, clever Miller having figured out that when it came to the trio covering up the deaths of the two girls, there was a floor (sorry) in their plan.

The story behind the murder of the two girls was certainly a fiendish construction. A perfect storm of evil impulses from Lee and Claire Ashworth and the girls' father/uncle Ricky Gillespie resulted in two dead and a pact to cover up the truth.

But you wouldn't want to measure the revelations about the case on the logic-o-meter, or the batty behaviour of the Ashworths in earlier episodes.

Anyway, it was hard to care much about the Sandbrook subplot.

The truth of it coming out was but a slighty satisfying resolution in the finale of a much less than satisfying second series.