As plots go, this one is familiar enough, a series of small incidents, a cancelled exhibition here, a threatened grant there, each one dismissed as a misunderstanding until the pattern becomes too neat to ignore. A weekend branded Fall of Freedom feels like the moment when the side characters finally realise they are in the same story. Whether the mystery resolves in favour of democracy or slips into a darker genre will depend on what happens when the posters come down and the cameras leave. Villains rarely reveal themselves at the first protest; they wait for the second, when everyone is a little more tired and a little less certain.