The Paradise, Series 2 Finale, BBC One

The sense of an ending is a hard thing to achieve. The Paradise has garnered a loyal following over two series, and no doubt there will be viewers sad to see it depart. But unless options are still being kept open – no announcement either way seems to have surfaced from the BBC – last night’s episode looked like a finale.

It certainly went out with a set-piece bang of a kind from which there would seem no way back. The marriage of Katherine (Elaine Cassidy) and Tom Weston (Ben Daniels) could hardly get any worse – it’s long strayed into the sinister territory of a Wilkie Collins novel, where’s he’s likely to lock her up any minute. By contrast, romance between Denise (Joanna Vanderham) and Moray (Emun Elliott) was floundering indecisively.

This made the return of the sprightly Clémence from Paris more than welcome. It’s the outsiders in episodic roles that have given The Paradise passing colour, and Clémence, as we recall from episode two, stands for la différence in every sense. Back then she was flirting with Denise – now that would have been an interesting direction for Bill Gallagher’s story to have taken – and here she was bonding les femmes again, bringing home the fact that the drama's female characters have come to dominate proceedings. What with Weston getting madder, and Moray wetter by the episode, there's increasingly been little competition.

Clémence (Branka Katić, pictured right) doesn’t let the story dawdle either. Where others in this cast would have taken hours to explain their plight, Clémence came straight out with it: she’d fled France pursued by a debt collector who’d managed to sell them to Weston before promptly expiring himself, overcome by the delights of the emporium (as last lines go, “the paradise, the paradise!” makes a nice change from “the horror, the horror!”). So now Weston, intent on making her his mistress, owned her in every sense. Until the latest craze sweeping Paris, hazard dice, came into play. The roll of le rouge et le noir, Clémence insisted, was how dress decisions were now being made in the French capital. It had you dreading the story would move from riffing on Zola to yet another classic novelist, in which case there really would be no end to proceedings.

It was rouge of a different sort that offered Denise a way out from her quandary, that of making her own way in the world and achieving the independence from Moray that would allow them to love each other. Specifically the powdered stuff that ladies across la Manche were beginning to wear, though it still seemed the height of scandal over here. With the help of mouthy cook Myrtle’s mum’s old beauty recipes, and supported by the quickest venture capital decision the world has ever seen (handy to have a stray millionaire floating around from earlier episodes), Denise looks set to found a cosmetics empire. But that, as they say (and we truly hope), is another story.

Katherine soon had other priorities on her mind

It was all getting a bit much, confusing even the redoubtable Jonas (David Hayman), who has come to double plot-fixing (“I serve the Paradise,” he was intoning as if the place was some sort of pagan god) with a bit of amateur psychoanalysis. There was no other way to explain his riverbank appearance, just in time to save Katherine from trying an Ophelia. She soon had other priorities on her mind, with the prospect of a new little Weston in the world presumably raising concerns on the gene pool front. Really, you’d have thought the only conjugation going on in that household was poor little Flora struggling with her (presumably French) grammar.

The Paradise could carry on dotting in new characters ad infinitum, as rather seems will be the case with ITV’s retail rival Mr Selfridge. Instead let’s hope it’s taken the wise way out, departing when the going is still (relatively) good. For last night's farewells, Maurizio Malagnini’s practically operatic score couldn't have been bettered. Time for this costume drama to head for the curtain department.