Major spoilers for the final episode of Vigil season 2 follow.
The sixth and final episode of Vigil's second season finally answers the question of who piloted the RPAS drone software to murder seven military personnel on the Dundair military base.
That first scene was a nerve-wracking Scotland set piece, in which Air Vice-Marshal Marcus Grainger (Dougray Scott) presided over a bells-and-whistles demonstration of the latest drone technology to visiting Wudyan potentates. But just as Grainger was starting to pat himself on the back, the training exercise went disastrously wrong when one of the drones took on a life of its own and started gunning down soldiers.
Who could track down the person who had assumed control of the tech? Enter DCI Amy Silva (Suranne Jones), who was sent out to Wudyan to do her digging, this time above ground.
The final episode begins on the military plane back to Scotland and in the first twist of a pretzel-shaped episode, Wes Harper (Jonathan Ajayi) turns up dead on the aircraft, with squadron leader Eliza Russell (Romola Garai) nearby and lightly injured.
Meanwhile, back on the ground, DI Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie) is dealing with the Scottish end of business, all while being heavily pregnant. She clambers after Ross Sutherland (David Elliot) as he goes to a secret rendezvous – only to watch him get shot by Derek McCabe (Steven Elder).
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McCabe spots a very poorly-hidden Kirsten behind a nearby rock and as she ambles away with as much as haste as she can muster, he shoots at her. You may wonder how a clearly cold-blooded killer managed to miss the slow-moving target that is Kirsten at such close range, but he does nip her in the neck, landing her in hospital.
At this point, Amy has figured out Russell lied about killing Wes in her statement on the plane, but both Russell and McCabe have seemingly slipped through the police's fingers.
As everything is coming to a head, the political situation has turned increasingly febrile, with politicians set to vote on sending troops to Wudyan in response to the apparent terrorist attack on Dundair.
Sensing things are not as they seem, DCI Silva takes matters into her own hands and tracks Ramsay (Amir El-Masry) with a covertly planted Apple Watch. Then, she follows him to some shady secret location and storms the building solo, to discover him questioning Russell.
As the police and military face conflicting interests, Grainger for once sides with DCI Silva and says they can take Russell in for questioning. This becomes important later on, just wait, as we finally learn who took control of the RPAS that day.
Who piloted the Dundair drone?
It's during DCI Silva's interrogation of Russell that we finally put most of the pieces together, with the help of Chapman's newly-discovered iPad and the messages on it.
In between some fabulous glasses-on and then glasses-off action from DCI Silva, she explains how they now know it was Russell who piloted the drone and shot the seven soldiers on the army base, leaving her with one lingering question: why did they need to kill so many people?
"It had to look real!" Russell exclaims. "Anything else and they would have swept it under the carpet. They would have called it an accident! It had to be something they couldn’t ignore!"
Why? Russell says McCabe was paying her, but when Silva pauses the recording, she says off the record that they had support from the British intelligence services.
Silva and frenemy Ramsay decide she must be covering for someone, at which point all clues seem to be pointing to Grainger, who it turns out was in cahoots with Russell. He conspired to make the weapons test look like a terrorist attack to push Britain into a conflict.
Another self-justifying speech ensues, as he tells Silva that Britain can't afford to alienate the Wudyan authorities. He says: "I didn't want anyone to die. The bigger picture is hundreds of thousands of lives. That is the nature of defence. You make sacrifices but you do it because your eyes are on the fundamentals."
With Grainger and Russell bang to rights, neither Kirsten nor Amy are happy that their trials will be held in closed court for the sake of national security, but with no closure for the victims' families as a result.
This is where the episode ends, as their trial unfolds with DCI Silva watching on. Ultimately, both Grainger and Russell are sentenced to life imprisonment.
But before that, Firas Zaman (Tommy Sim'aan) – the journalist caught spying on the weapons test in the first episode – arrives to deliver a victim impact statement, in which he lays out how the arms sales will continue to profit those in the UK while those in the Middle East suffer.
With season two of Vigil, instead of a keen sense of claustrophobia, the show tried to play on our fears of technology exceeding past the point at which we can control it. But in this final monologue, we see that while we might be fixated on technology running amuck, we're more than capable of wreaking havoc when left to our own devices.
Vigil is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas. When she's not bingeing a boxset, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
