Well. [Spooks 9 spoilers!]

[First, thanks to the person who explained to me how to get access to the episode so that I wouldn’t go crazy. You know who you are, and you are a personal hero to me at the moment. The purpose of these posts for me right now is just to mark my initial reactions to this series. They are password protected in order to protect the interests of readers who are hostile to spoilers. I can’t imagine at this point that I will offer any extended interpretations here, though I am also not guaranteeing I won’t. I also may unprotect some of them after Spooks 9 has finished airing in the UK, when I assume that people who want to watch ahead of TV or DVD will have been able to gain access. All this is to say that you should make the same assumptions if you comment here as you do in commenting on normal posts, i.e., that anything you say may become visible to the entire internet eventually. One last thing: I want to express my support for and indeed encouragement of anyone who doesn’t want to discuss in this strange atmosphere. I am assuming most people who really care about this show and Mr. Armitage’s role in it will want to talk about it on the Spooks Forum, one of the Armitage fora linked in my sidebar, or perhaps on C19, if they discuss Spooks there. I am just not a discussion board person, but I fully support everyone who is and prefers that kind of discussion to this sort, and I understand that people have limited amounts of time in their commenting day. These are all my caps but I’m not captioning them with my usual meticulousness. Will do that if I unprotect the posts. I’m writing these after one or at most two views.]

To say I am flabbergasted would be understating it. Ros dead (not a surprise, but upsetting nonetheless), a marriage proposal from Harry to Ruth, which is then turned down, Harry assassinates the old Home Secretary, Harry’s attempted resignation, the Grid gains a private contractor, Lucas almost kills an innocent bystander on purpose, and then, oh, by the way, he’s not Lucas. One almost doesn’t know what to say. I understand now on multiple levels why the summaries I’ve been reading say this is more like the “old” Spooks (also because I’ve now seen a lot more of the “old” Spooks than I had even a month ago). I can also now completely understand why Mr. Armitage might have been disturbed by this plotline — even though I have only seen one scene of it so far. Seriously, I got up from this episode with my world shaken. It must have been much worse for him, since he has a bigger investment in Lucas’s identity than I do.

At first I thought the proposal scene in the cemetery was just too much; no one would be such an idiot as to propose in a situation like that, and it seemed to me like a plea for cheap emotional involvement from the script. I felt like the reading from Pope was just one too many insistences on emotion from the script, as well: we’re already upset about Ros’s departure and the way she died, and to have this poem read about her? I assume in a memorial service like this one it’s picked either by the deceased or his her family. Would Ruth have chosen it? In any case, Ros is not someone who can espouse the perspective of the speaker at the beginning of the poem — it makes the wish for peace seem like a statement from the grave — as the script itself underlines, the things that Ros wanted but couldn’t have. But in fact she did not die unlamented, even if only six people came to the funeral, or without a stone. Too much pathos. So jerking the failed proposal (and implicitly, the resignation) into that maelstrom of emotions was just too much for me  — at the beginning.

Love how the shadow over his eyebrows is cast down upon his face, almost a sort of notional sunglasses that make him look not only mean, but also tired, as the rest of his face seems washed out in comaprison. Also love Lucas in a jeans jacket for a change. Downmarket and sexy, as are the brown denims. Not that I don’t like the Belstaff jacket, but this is more the kind of guy I tend to encounter. Yum.

Lots of moments again with unclear meanings: assassination of Home Secretary: ongoing battle with Nightingale or just settling the score for Ros? “Lucas”‘s (it kills me that I’m now going to have to write that in quotation marks) unnecessary provocation of the “pimp”: attempt to find out why she’s on the boat, or soft heart for abused women — white knight behavior? Plot improbability: Harry hires a private contractor who walks in off the street claiming she wants to get clean, with the explanation that the service needs different kinds of people? Even less probable than him letting Lucas back into Section D practically unexamined. OTOH: nice to have a character who can stand up to Lucas.

Given what we learn at end of episode about the problem with Lucas’s identity, who needs to “get clean”? Is there a parallel character trajectory / contrast being set up here? Also to Harry with his statements about not wanting to be covered in blood? We’ve heard that the theme of the series is identity, but this episode is also hinting strongly at honor themes. Implicit parallelism of MI5 and the terrorists: terrorist who shoots a sailor saying to Dmitri: “you killed him”; Lucas saying to Aala, “please don’t make me do this.”

Funny Servetus moment: Tariq using a p2p method to get the computing done on his decryption algorithm — I used a p2p method for the first time ever to DL this episode tonight. Wondering if the university spooks will be at my door tomorrow to confiscate my computer? Read a bit about how torrents work last night — fascinating. Alternative career for Servetus?

Sympathy or curiosity? Interesting that this gesture begins with a tilt of his head toward the right, which is unusual in the Armitage gestural repertoire. Throws me as viewer a bit off balance as I am not sure how to place it.

Just cause I like this facial expression. Note that we’re back to the left movement here.

Lots of great shots of Mr. Armitage looking up from under his brow — and a couple of microexpressions involving lower eyelid movement to signal concentration or emotion, which he does with such subtle perfection. In SB some of that was too obvious, but here it happens so quickly you almost don’t see it. Yum. (Still think about Lucas vs John Porter comparisons in back of my mind…).

Character arc for Lucas: looks at the beginning like a move away from weird season 8 Lucas, who makes the characterization Armitage established for him in S7 fray at every seam, and about whom I’m still writing in conjunction with Sarah and Oleg. So happy about that, esp. the return to the more compressed gestural range. But then upset Lucas at the very end, in the midst of the move toward cruel Lucas, whom we saw at moments in 7.6 and 8.7. Emotional Lucas at very end: credible, or too much? Big Adam’s apple (pharyngeal prominence, for MillyMe) moves when he encounters that suitcase, another classic move in the Armitage gestural repertoire, but too much here? I’d have guessed the reaction should have been more toward shock / surprise as opposed to upsetness / fear. Hard to know how to interpret this until we see more. Of course, it is a fantastic cliffhanger and may be worth those big throat moves just for that, to keep us thinking about it until next week. But look at the beautiful, moving way that Armitage moves Lucas’s eyes in this scene:

This is over approximately three seconds. Impressive facial muscular control, not just eyes. We see the eyes, but the brow and mouth muscles are moving, too, and the head shifts position , very, very slightly. These moves are so subtle they can’t be intentional, they must be the result of the inner state of the actor. This is really well done.

Armitage’s performance: oh, Mr. Armitage, you look so good. Kaprekar was right. Ich habe Sie zum fressen gern. (Somehow that just doesn’t sound as good in formal address. Hmmm.) And yes, as Judith notes, there are still costuming problems with those shirts. Do I have to come after you with my needle and pincushion? Nonetheless, the suit in the funeral scene is not bad. It’s still not very carefully tailored, but in its broad outlines it’s much better: the costumers got that the thin lapel a la the SB premiere jacket is better for Armitage’s chest construction, the waist silhouette is the best we’ve seen in a Spooks costume for him, and the waist button of the jacket is in the right place on this suit. (As per usual, his pants are the right length. Feeling the need to say something positive: he almost always has the right length trouser, and this is great because it underlines the long line of those long, long legs.) Still: questioning the choice to give Lucas a black shirt and no tie under a black coat in this scene, though — it makes him look WAY too casual; maybe the fashion in England is different but in the U.S. a PK would know that this occasion demands a white shirt and tie (as both Tariq, who’s presumably not even a Christian, and Harry, seem to know). Characterization, or not enough attention to detail?

Wait, I got distracted by all of those formal clothes. The performance, the performance. The main things I noticed were:

• Questions about emotionality in relationship to character arc noted above. We need to see more.
• I feel like Lucas’s physicality as an action man is much more pronounced and convincing here than it was in Spooks 8: there was always a slight offbalanced quality to Lucas’s run and to some of his motion. (Didn’t help that the camera sometimes filmed his run from unflattering angles, as in 7.5). That seems to be erased now: Lucas’s major muscle groups, esp in the action scenes on the ship, seem to move much more like those of John Porter. Note in particular Lucas’s total ease moving up and down the metal staircases on the ship — and remember places in Armitage’s past roles where his characterization broke up over having to go up and down stairs. I assume that all of the extreme physical training for SB is the cause of this.
• I also thought he hit the emotion in the scene with Aala / “Talwar” just right — combination of expressions of enervation (the “please don’t make me do this” really hits as sincere; don’t force me into this brutality; Lucas believes he is being forced, and then in the end is unable to carry through his ploy to murder her mother) with rage. Armitage is playing Lucas who is playing a sort of brutality that he doesn’t really feel. The statements about “don’t think I won’t do this” equally threat to his interlocutor and attempts to talk himself into rising into a for him new level of cruelty. Hard to hit this kind of combination of emotions, especially when you’re playing someone who is himself acting, so good job here, Armitage. Very multifaceted and convincing.

Of course, if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you’ll know how hard the penultimate scene hit me and why. Harry can’t resign because (a) he can’t have the simple life Pope talks about in the poem (well, Ros didn’t have it, either!) and (b) as Ruth says, if the decisions are impossible, aren’t you the one in the best position to be making them? The dream of the ethically clean life is illusory. As Lucas says in 7.8, what’s lost can never be found again. Still: (c) it’s only at the end that I come to accept that the pathos of the opening is necessary; and (d) it’s only the plot strand of the potential destruction of Westminster that convinces me that Harry’s rejection of his planned path is even possible. I.e., I have an intensifying issue with these plot lines in which the destruction of all of England is foretold. Maybe it’s because I just saw 2.5, but if I add that to 7.5, 7.8 and 8.6, I’m getting tired of these threats that threaten ALL OF ENGLAND. When they are repeated over time they threaten verisimilitude because it seems unlikely to me that the spooks could always save the day, that they would never bobble anything or fail to live up to the challenge, and in that case, that there wouldn’t be some fairly series dings to England emerging here. Yet in my own life I know that no dirty bomb, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons have ever been exploded in England, and Soros’s attack on the pound notwithstanding I feel like the regular threats to the economy are also overplayed. So I like the episodes with limited threats with serious implications better (e.g., 8.8), but I don’t see those threats as potentially moving Harry back into his job. He wants to resign because of Ros’s death (and, one imagines, the resonances it calls forth with the assassination of Arkady Kachimov), but a minor threat isn’t going to convince him that he needs to keep going.

Anyway. Those are my reactions.

Wait. One last thing. If Lucas North is fake identity, did they have to pick “John” as the Christian name for the real identity? John Thornton, John Standring, John Porter, John Mulligan … seriously. What percentage of British men are named John vs what percentage of Armitage roles? This approaches statistical improbability. By now, Mr. Armitage must be so used to hearing himself called “John” that he turns around when he hears it.

~ by Servetus on September 21, 2010.