ver the years, Unforgotten has turned into one of the finest shows on British television. By the time it reached its fourth series, which attracted more viewers than ever before, thanks, I suspect, to its growing reputation as a sure bet, it was as lean as an elite athlete. Each episode was perfectly paced and plotted, satisfyingly knotty without being absurd, and the interlaced web of characters always felt human as they juggled their many issues. One woman held it all together. As DCI Cassie Stuart, Nicola Walker put in a career-best performance and that’s saying something. Cassie was a brilliant copper, dogged and determined, a bit distracted when it came to family matters, but not in that maddening, TV-world, overwritten “fatal flaw” way, and she made solving historical murder cases look easy. She was also, if you will allow me to quote her backpack-toting right-hand man Sunny, his “friend and I loved her”. There are spoilers ahead, which I think is OK, considering it has been a few days now. If you are an Unforgotten fan and have yet to see the season finale, then I can only assume you’re on holiday somewhere that ITV doesn’t reach, which is still illegal, and Cassie would not be pleased. The penultimate episode ended with a car crash that came so unexpectedly that I genuinely and audibly gasped, and in the finale, as the murder case was finally wrapped up, Cassie, the best fictional detective since Sarah Lund, only went and bloody died, in hospital, after a random accident, leaving Sanjeev Bhaskar’s Sunny to deliver a devastating, brilliant eulogy that had viewers in pieces. In my house, there was talk of writing a letter to Ofcom. (If people can complain about jokes or dance routines in their droves, then I can complain about being emotionally ravaged by the demise of a major fictional character.) Worse, Bhaskar tweeted a picture of Sunny’s famous backpack, into which Walker had slipped a note saying she loved him, signed “Cassie”. When he opened it on set, he wrote, he “cracked”. Sorry, I’ve got something in my eye again. I realise that I am taking this all very seriously for a TV show, but not as seriously as the Mirror, which put a picture of Walker in character on its front page on Wednesday with the headline “Never forget her”. It felt sufficiently deferential. The day after the series finale aired, ITV announced that Unforgotten would return for a fifth series, with a new partner for Sunny. I am glad that the show will live to solve another thorny old crime, even if Cassie did not. Ernest Hemingway: the old man and the fridge magnet Ernest Hemingway is the subject of the latest Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary series, putting the writer in the company of previous grand topics that include the Vietnam war, jazz and baseball. The series begins in the US this week and, as a Hemingway lover, I hope it will end up in the UK at some point soon. There are few great authors who feel so ill-suited to the current age as Hemingway, who has come to stand for a certain kind of what we would now call toxic masculinity. “We’re aware of the fact that he’s a controversial figure,” Novick told the New York Times. I once went to a writing class, where we were assigned his short story Hills Like White Elephants, and the discussion became a raging argument about whether it was misogynistic or not. I have never felt that should be a barrier to reading him. Years later, I went to an exhibition filled with the ephemera of his writing life. I bought a fridge magnet (it’s what he would have wanted), a knitted finger puppet of a generic fisherman that is now stuck right at the top of the fridge. It turns out that the dog, too, has a taste for Hemingway. Lil Nas X: so it’s true – the devil has the best shoes Last week, Lil Nas X slid down a long pole into hell and gave the devil a lapdance. When the gloriously exuberant video for the rapper’s Montero (Call Me By Your Name) single was released, it gleefully tossed fuel on to the fire of American conservatives, in part, as one rightwing preacher breathlessly admitted, because they had enjoyed the “cool beat” in Old Town Road. He had deceived them with his take on country music and now, here he was, using patchwork denim as a fan. The art of the pop star as provocateur seemed to be fading in a seen-it-all-before world, with the exception, perhaps, of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, whose WAP shocked the shockable, at least. Lil Nas X, too, is reviving it. Last week, the conversation honed in on Satan himself. The rapper had collaborated with an art collective, MSCHF, to release 666 pairs of Nike trainers, modified to include a pentagram, an inverted cross and, apparently, a drop of human blood in the soles. Nike sued to stop MSCHF selling the shoes, with the inadvertently amusing statement that the “unauthorised Satan Shoes are likely to cause confusion”. Nike won the case, though all pairs but one had already been shipped. It’s hard to see who loses here. Lil Nas X remains in the news and the Montero video has more than 70m views at the time of writing. Conservative commentators have plenty of fodder to gorge on. But it’s those attempting to resell the shoes online who have triumphed: one optimistic eBayer is trying to shift a pair that cost £740 for more than £18,000. Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist