It’s a shame for CBC that one of their biggest ratings successes lately is six episodes and done, but it’s a sign of hope that an expansive co-production based on Canadian literature could make such a splash.

Clement Virgo’s adaptation of Lawrence Hill’s novel comes to a close with an episode that sees Aminata reclaim her story once again.

It begins the Nova Scotia contingent still not so free in Freetown, the town they built from scratch, guarded by British soldiers who want them to stay in their little piece of Sierra Leone.

Their past flashes before their eyes as new captives stream past their town on the way to a life of slavery. Moses is killed trying to free a child, a grim reminder of the danger still around them.

Aminata remains determined to return to her village — the village Chekura helped steal her from, and he’s not terribly enthusiastic. “Why do you always make me chase you? We can love each other right here.”

He relents, as do the British slave traders who can help them with passage to the interior, and who sip tea from silver pots as their slaves scrabble for food among their sick and dying.

“Why do you trade in men?” she asks. “Everybody’s doing it” is the less than impressive answer, both for its moral emptiness and its slightly clunky dialogue. “Was it really that bad for you?”

Captain Clarkson is one who knows how bad it is, and who encourages her to return with him to London to convince the government to abolish the slave trade. “We need your story and we need your voice.”

Though Aminata is determined to return to her birthplace, she learns it no longer exists just before she and Chekura are confronted with a group of captives they have the power to free, just as they had hoped someone would help free them as children. Chekura sacrifices his life for their freedom, and a prostrate Aminata is rescued by nearby villagers. “I seem to have trouble dying” she tells them in something of an understatement.

She and Clarkson bond over classic English literature like Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe, and Aminata’s story is at least as epic a stranger in a strange land story as either of those, even when she returns to her birthplace.

With no ties to Sierra Leone anymore, she goes to England to meet William Wilberforce and his abolitionists, eager to hear the gory details of her life — and shape the narrative to best suit their purposes. Instead she pens her own story — The Book of Negroes — and helps them abolish the slave trade (though not slavery itself). In another last act of atonement, Solomon Lindo reappears with her long-lost daughter May, reunited with her now-elderly mother, as Aunjanue Ellis has played her convincingly over an expansive age span.

A weakness of the mini-series has been the compression of an eventful lifetime into 4.5-ish hours. But it’s been a captivating journey despite its flaws.

Canada gets her starring turn in the fifth episode of The Book of Negroes, and she’s not ready for her closeup.

Nova Scotia was, at the time of the novel and mini-series events, part of the British Empire and where some United Empire Loyalists settled, including those who were named in the historical book of Negroes. In our fictional world, Aminata lands to find the promised land is instead an inhospitable land, in climate and in temperament.

The new arrivals are cold to the point of taking a coat from a dead man, hungry enough that a dog is led off-screen by a man with an ax, crowded enough that cholera runs through the makeshift Birchtown, where the black inhabitants are segregated, waiting for the land they were promised.

Aminata’s character is shown when she tries to return some potatoes dropped by a white couple, though she’s told to keep them by a woman who ends up nursing her back to health — but she loses her newborn son while still separated from Chekura, whose ship had landed elsewhere.

This episode deviates from the novel significantly, permanently shedding Aminata of a child and reuniting her with supposed-to-be-dead Chekura for the voyage to Sierra Leone. I’m neutral on such changes from the source material — different media have different storytelling needs and strengths — and I can see why they wanted the love story to form a through-line in the mini-series. I  occasionally feel as if the cohesion of the series suffers from the opposite: taking too many incidents from the novel and jaggedly gluing them together.

Louis Gossett, Jr. and Jane Alexander make memorable guest stars in this episode as something of a church and community elder in the former’s case, and something of a racist harpy in the latter’s.

The black residents are segregated and paid less for the same work — if they can find work — and so subject to slavery, indentured servitude or crippling debt.

Aminata remains their storyteller, writing the abolitionists in England for assistance. Her erudite letters earn her a job in the print shop of Maria Witherspoon (Alexander) where she witnesses that woman’s disdain for black people (though she magnanimously calls Aminata “one of the good ones”).

When Aminata is accosted by Witherspoon’s son, Jason kills him in the ensuing struggle, setting off the woman’s rage. The town is unhappy, to say the least, not just by the black presence, but by their ingratitude in making them look bad to the British.

Aminata’s old boss Clarkson (Ben Chaplin) arrives in response to her letters to offer the freed slaves a new promised land: Sierra Leone, where they need a community to stake their empire’s claim. He promises farm land where they can grow food and be free. Reminded that was the promise of Nova Scotia as well, Clarkson says “yeah, my bad.” OK that’s not an exact quote, but a number of the Birchtown residents, including Aminata, choose to believe again and return to the continent from which they were stolen.

Reunited with Chekura thanks to Clarkson — making him a bit too much her saviour in my eyes — the couple sail toward the new hope and the final episode.