Will there be a second series of Baptiste? Creators Harry and Jack Williams discuss what's next for the BBC crime drama

***Warning: spoilers ahead for Baptiste episode six***

In the sixth and final episode, Baptiste’s biological son Niels (Boris Van Severen) was revealed to be the corrupt cop helping out the Brigada Serbilu all along.

Baptiste and Genevieve (Jessica Raine) had initially thought it was Niels’ mother Martha (Barbara Sarafian) working for the Romanian gang. In fact, she was completely unaware of her son’s deception and the fact he was tracing her calls.

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In a desperate and dramatic face-off with the police, Niels ended up shooting his own mother in the head and escaping the ambush.

“We wanted things to be messy, and to show what lengths Niels would go to and how selfish he was,” explains co-creator Harry Williams.

Niels was eventually caught and sent behind bars. Thanks to Kim Vogel’s (Talisa Garcia) letter, the trafficked girls were also freed, though sadly with the exception of Cristina.

The series closed with a poignant scene between Baptiste and Edward Stratton (Tom Hollander), who met on the beach to reflect on the loved ones they had lost. Edward asked the French detective: “Are you going to retire at last?”

Baptiste didn't answer – so we put the same question to the show’s creators Harry and Jack Williams.

At the time of writing a second series has not been confirmed, but the writers are hoping for one – so will Baptiste continue to work as a detective?

“Going back into the profession full time is probably not something he's going to do,” reveals Jack, explaining that while he’ll always have the “skill set” of a detective, Baptiste is unlikely to still be in the job in an official sense the next time we see him.

“No, what we're interested in seeing him do is ending up having to help and looking into what the familial connection to that is, rather than him being brought in and paid as a consultant,” adds Harry.

“We don’t want to see him being hired by the police department to consult because then it risks becoming very much a procedural detective show. I think, going forward, we'd like to find ways to avoid repeating ourselves and to break the mould again.”

Would Baptiste’s relationship with Niels be further explored in a second series? “We’d love to bring Niels back in some form,” says Jack. “Whether that's for a scene or a whole story, we don't quite know yet.

“I think it would be really interesting: there's a history and there's this gang and there's a lot of things we've set up that we don't want to let go of, but equally we don’t want to disappear down the rabbit hole of making it a highly serialised trilogy," Jack says.

“We'd also love to give Tcheky even more to do: he did such amazing work in The Missing series two with his illness, and in this series he's dealt with the threat to his family. We'd love to give him something more; he's brilliant at big, emotional stuff. We could give him more to chew on.”

The writers would also be keen for Raine to reprise her role as Genevieve in another series. “Absolutely. We don't know a lot about her: there's definitely more stories to play with her, so we'd be interested in bringing her back.” And although unlikely, they say that if they can think of a way to bring Edward back, “rest assured we will”.

Harry and Jack’s dream castings for series two would be Damian Lewis and Sarah Lancashire, and they say they’d like the new story to be set in “possibly Budapest, possibly Macedonia”.

“We’re going to sit down with the BBC in a few weeks and persuade them to make more,” says Jack.

Here’s hoping…

Baptiste series one is available in full on BBC iPlayer

This article was originally published on 24 March 2019