Once more to the Yard

DSI Jane Tennison, the Scotland Yard detective played by Helen Mirren in the “Prime Suspect” series, returns for the last time this Sunday, in the terminally titled “Prime Suspect 7: The Final Act.” That actress and role are together again, and for the last time, qualifies this as a television event, and it does not disappoint. “Satisfying” is possibly not the right word for a film whose apportioning of pain and loss and rain-bitten gloom is so pervasive, but it doesn’t violate the spirit of the series or of its perennially half-triumphant heroine. It doesn’t take us out on a sour note.

The case this time involves the murder of a 14-year-old girl, but by now we don’t watch “Prime Suspect” (which begins Sunday in the framework of PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre”) for the thrill of seeing a murder solved. Murders are solved all over television every day, and there are only so many variations to play on that theme, so many shocks left to deliver -- indeed, there are perhaps no shocks left to deliver, so ardently do our police shows court the perverse. And considered merely as a whodunit, the plot of “The Final Act” is neither particularly compelling nor hard for the viewer to solve, although Tennison herself has some trouble along the way. (If she only recognized that she was in a television show, her job would be a lot easier.)

But all we really care about by this point is What Happens to Jane. Though more absent from our lives than not -- this is, after all, only the seventh edition in 15 years (although “Prime Suspect 4” comprised three separate stories) -- she’s the constant, the locus of our hopes. However many victims and unhappy or luckless others litter the script, we want her to survive, and to survive with at least a slim chance of something like happiness. Tennison’s struggle for respect in a man’s world, which defined her character and animated earlier episodes, has also ceased to matter. She’s earned that respect; her problem now is not to squander it.

When we meet her again, two years after the previous episode, she’s drinking to the point of blacking out; her father (the great Frank Finlay) is dying; she has only the most tenuous relationship with the rest of her family; and her investigation has thrown her into an improvidently close relationship with the victim’s best friend, Penny (the thoroughly impressive Laura Greenwood), who might represent the daughter she never had, or the sister she could actually love, or simply the friend she lacks. (The screenplay, by Frank Deasy, is happily ambiguous about these things.)

“You don’t seem sad,” Penny tells her, “you just seem lonely.”

“Yes, I am,” she answers. “I am lonely.”

Which might not be the worst thing. Apart from the practical matters of whether her drinking will sideline her career before she gets her pension, or whether the filmmakers will even let her live to the end credits -- a title like “The Final Act” does imply all sorts of awful possibilities -- “Prime Suspect 7” raises the more elusive question of what makes a life worth living. Tennison’s devotion to work at the expense of the things we sentimentally tend to regard as the signifiers of personal success (love, children, contentment) can be seen from one angle as a failure; her sister certainly does. And yet she has done what she set out to do.

This is also a story about age, and disappearing into it. Tennison’s impending retirement is a step into the void. (That she’s moving to Florida sends a kind of chill down the spine, as if she had announced that she’d just swallowed poison.) She’s surrounded by young people here, who can’t see her for their constant text-messaging, and by cutaway images of a London that belongs to them.

Also underscoring the passage of time is the return of her old occasional nemesis, Sgt. Bill Otley (Tom Bell, who died not long after), in an unexpected form. And we see her in her old room, facing her younger self, even becoming her younger self, as she dances to old 45s.

Mirren is as usual terrific, but the element of time -- those 15 years -- adds another layer: This is a role she doesn’t interpret so much as inhabit. An actress with no false modesty, she is often called “brave” for her willingness to look bad -- and I don’t mean her forgoing of cosmetic surgery, which has not-so-ironically left her more attractive than her many worked-upon peers and allowed her to play actual women of more or less her actual age (she’s 61).

But she lets herself look weak here, wrung out, unfocused, undignified -- she makes a frighteningly convincing drunk -- and in her beauty and decay embodies both the Jane who is and the Jane who might have been, inextricably bound and beyond judgment.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘Masterpiece Theatre --

Prime Suspect 7: The Final Act’

Where: KCET

When: 9 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)