The Fall, BBC Two - Telegraph From a fine beginning to an absolutely stonking end. Even in the wake of last week's sofa-munchingly scary cliffhanger, I half-expected the concluding episode of BBC Two's The Fall would be a terrifying yet conventional cop-drama race to the finish, leaving the killer in jail, the kids tucked up in bed, and the world a safe and comfy place again. I couldn't have been more wrong. Instead we got a gripping, slow-burning, brilliantly constructed tease, with ice-cold supercop Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) inching ever closer to ever-madder serial killer Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) - only to have him walk away at the end like Hannibal Lecter, free to strike terror into us all over again. This on top of an episode of skin-crawling intensity. Was there anyone who didn't feel physically sick on behalf of Spector's wife Sally Ann (Bronagh Waugh) when she swallowed his lies and made love with him, even as the blood of a victim was on his hands? Undoubtedly there were elements of The Fall that came close to being too horrible, too graphic. But there was intelligence and depth too, and no doubting how effectively Allan Cubitt's sharp writing and Jakob Verbruggen's brooding direction got their hooks into our darker fears and didn't let go. What made it one of the most maddeningly moreish series endings in years was how it left loose ends flying like party poppers in the wind. What now for all those wonderful minor characters: Archie Panjabi's charismatic pathologist, those intimately drawn Belfast cops and hard men, the subplot about Gibson's murdered one-night stand? Surely the series can't now move to Scotland - where Spector was last seen heading. Rather than fava beans and a nice Chianti, can it really be haggis and whisky next year? Presumably not. Apart from the casting of Anderson and Dornan, the best thing about The Fall is its familiar-yet-alien Belfast milieu. What other cop has to deal with sectarian riots outside a murder scene; what other serial killer's meticulous plans could be confounded by Loyalist thugs? But that's always a sure sign of a great ending - the pleasurable frustration of not knowing, the Twitterish urge to speculate endlessly on what will happen next.