DNA – BBC4 Saturday 9 pm

I haven't watched the final episode yet but will have to watch ep 7 again first as I was completely baffled by it! I was very tired, that's my excuse. Glad to hear Rolf gets some kind of closure.

Goodness me! What a tangled web of baby laundering and multiple timelines! I think I've got it sorted in my mind, finally. A heck of a lot of exposition needed in the final episode to tie up all the plot strands, which isn't a good thing IMO.

So Skaubo didn't in fact facilitate the theft of Rolf's daughter but he somehow managed to trace Julita to her home in Poland (DNA?) and pay her off with a false birth certificate and an introduction to the French home for single mothers where his wife had once worked, which seems astonishing – if he wanted to pay her off (or 'pay it forward', an expression I've never heard before), wouldn't money have been better so that she could live her own life in her own home? Was that just to continue the French thread and have a lovely sunny place for the final scenes?

I'm also astonished that Minna's adoptive parents were obliged to hand her over to her biological mother straight away. It was brutal. Wouldn't there have been many meetings with Minna living with her adoptive parents at least for a while? And will her father reappear at some point? I imagine it was done in this way so that Rolf would reconsider his thought of taking back his own daughter when he eventually found her in France.

Class acting though, particularly from the actress playing Julita.

Yes, that's what they were up to – taking babies from single mothers who were unable to look after them, giving them a new identity and selling them to childless couples. Lovely occupation.

The Danish original is 'giv det videre' which translates as 'give it further' which I guess amounts to the same thing. It's a new one on me.

Something else that occurred to me – why did Skaubo invite Rolf into his home? He respected him as a detective so he must have known Rolf would work it out eventually. A case of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer?

This was happening here until the 70s and no doubt it still occasionally does.

GP arranged adoptions are the hardest to trace. These were always private arrangements and the birth certificate will be in the 'new' parent's names.

I used to have to keep The Syphilis Register when I worked at the STI Clinic. It went back to 1852. Obviously at that time there were lots of babies who went straight to orphanages. Later you start to get GP adoptions coming in, especially once Syphilis was treatable. From about 1920 onwards it looked as if every unmarried mother had her baby 'adopted', with married women that reduced to about 30%. Obviously both world wars had a big impact. Reading the scant notes available, the GPs were present at the birth and for a fee they arranged the adoption. The 'new' father registered the birth from the note given by the GP. Other than the register which is not public there would be no record officially and the register does not name adoptive parents. This dwindles by the 60s but there was still an occasional one into the 70s. After that I never found a record of adoption. I presume social workers were all doing it by then.

However, I'd be quite sure this does happen now and again, especially amongst certain communities.

I needed the recap at the beginning, too - it's been nearly 3 years since S1 started.

I actually started this thread and commented on the first series, but I have absolutely no memory of it and didn't see it last weekend. Is it a new story or a continuation of the previous one? I'm wondering if it's worth trying to catch up.