“Taboo” is an extremely dirty show. Like, not just in the “trashy subject matter” kind of way but in the “the Prince Regent of England looks like a toad and Tom Hardy bites people’s throats out” kind of way.

Blimey. Taboo really took us to hell and back in the penultimate episode of the series opening with Winter’s funeral and ending with Tom Hardy’s James Delaney facing all manner of horrors in the Tower of London.

After weeks of mystery, murder and muttering we’re finally in the home stretch of period drama Taboo, with a whole heap of James Delaney’s secrets revealed and some no-doubt explosive revelations to come in the remaining episode this series has to air. Still, this penultimate torture-filled instalment still might have left a few heads scratching, so with that in mind we’ve continued our weekly tradition of querying, quizzing and overall questioning the main points of what we saw in the latest instalment, with a mind to discovering what we can expect for the series finale.

If anything, episode two of BBC period drama Taboo was even more confusing than the first , with Tom Hardy’s mysterious adventurer James Delaney offering hints about his past, uncovering secret relatives and searching for assassins through the shadowy streets of 19th-century London. Eagled-eared viewers may have noticed that Taboo’s theme song was different this week, with the plink-plonk style of episode 1 replaced by a strings arrangement.

Murder and madness, incest, slavery, and witchcrafta It wasn’t just the presence of Tom Hardy that made Taboo a dark, disturbing, break with tradition, by Jim Shelley Taboo lived up its name and proved nothing is sacred – not even the most comforting conventions of that great British tradition: Saturday night television. The legions of caterwauling karaoke contestants had been silenced and there was not a Doctor or Dalek in sight.

Taboo, the new Steven Knight mini-series debuting on BBC One and FX , is gorgeously constructed and well acted, though its narrative is often intentionally inscrutable. Starring Tom Hardy and created by Knight, Hardy, and his father Chips Hardy, Taboo tells the story of Englishman James Delaney, whose father’s death spurs him to return to London from Africa after being thought dead for more than a decade.