SPOILER - Big issue with S2 finale

Just finished it and was thinking the same thing! They should have done it in such a way that he had to stay behind.
Freddie does survive, I read that they were planning on pushing him over to the dark side in the 3rd season.

I thought it was pretty clear that he had survived, because Bel was sobbing but then she got a phone call and she suddenly perked way up, dropped the phone and ran frantically down the stairs with an expression on her face like "must get to Freddy!"....if she'd gotten a call saying Freddy had died, she'd have still been sobbing and generally looking lachrymose...the caller must have told her that Freddy was alive and she was rushing to the hospital. IMO.

This show has a fair whack of writing that doesn't make a lot of sense. And it often descends into cheese. The cliffhanger ending was cringeworthy, and as the OP points out, the build up to it was senseless.

A virtue of programmes like this, set in a near past that overlaps our own media age, is that the writer has an opportunity to go wild with irony. With Life on Mars for example we are simultaneously able to poke fun at crime shows of the 70s while actually watching one. For many viewers, 'Fire up the Quattro' contained no irony at all and they were able to indulge in a show that violated cynical modern sensibilities.

The 2 major plotlines of The Hour invoked the RL narrative of the Suez Crisis and the Profumo Scandal. The Hour gives them a 50s style treatment, full of the era's tropes. But, it doesn't do so convincingly. It muddles itself, bouncing back and forth between a modern conspiracy theory approach and Hitchock style suspense. Basically, it forgets what it is trying to do, or at least, could be doing.

In short, as the series developed, The Hour began to take itself too seriously. It stopped being ironic and became every bit as cliched as the subject matter it should have had under the microscope.