Finally Lucas is scripted convincingly! [Spooks 9.1-.2 spoilers!]

Same disclaimers as last time. Tonight in class we read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which discusses the loss of the aura of the stage actor in the age of screen productions. Some of Mr. Armitage’s statements about the difference between stage and screen acting were floating through my head, but one of the things the discussants contested in Benjamin’s interpretation was the extent to which the screen actor loses his “aura.” This is a bowdlerization of what Benjamin meant, but I think Armitage gives himself a real aura here. Here ends the intellectualizing wankery.
Wow. This was simply an amazing episode. I had a lump in my throat at the end. You don’t have any reason to know how rare that is in my life, but trust me, I’m not a crier (I’ve never cried while watching North & South, for instance) and this kind of drama would practically never cause that reaction in me. Lots of stuff to talk about, so I am just going to take the serial approach. This is after one watch-through and then review to get at the points and shots that struck me. But there’s plenty of stuff I will be watching again over the course of this week. Several scenes here are worthy of lengthy analysis, and provide a foothold for intepretive coherency (as opposed to just an opportunity for a litany of confusing moments and missed opportunities, as so often in S8).

Of course, we find out what’s in the suitcase, but not right away. No dancing banana outfit. Can you identify all of these objects? Eyeballing that yellowish thing on the right margin suggests that it says Tinerhir. Not sure what that will mean for us later. There’s a silver-mercury mine there, apparently. Perhaps Lucas was prospecting?

Also intrigued by the backstory created by the suitcase. We now know that Maya studied at Leeds. I’d always figured Lucas for Oxbridge. Guess we’ll learn more soon.

The script:

Obviously, we don’t know how it ends yet, but my preliminary judgment is that we are thankfully back to the script coherence of earlier seasons (of the ones I’ve seen so far, esp S2 and potentially S7) that seemed to have been abandoned in S8 in favor of the exploitation of sentiment. This despite the use of a narrative technique that I was annoyed about when Mr. Armitage’s Loose Ends interview spoilered it for me (grrrr, Mr. Armitage. DO NOT TELL US what is going to happen in the show. I AM NOT KIDDING. One reason I like your acting is the opportunity it affords me to watch the way that you react to things that I am not anticipating in the script, and you rob me of that pleasure when you tell me what’s going to happen) and about which I am still not totally convinced.

Yes, it’s the retelling of the story from the perspective of a different character. I’ll reserve final judgment on it until I see how this story arc goes over the season, but in general one thing that I love about Spooks is having to rethink how I know what I know once a new piece of information is revealed. It’s fun to try to make a list of all of the information that you have to resituate once (for instance) you know that Beth is acting in her own interests in the elevator — so for me the quota of additional information that you get from the renarration would have to be extremely high to justify robbing me of the intellectual exercise of rethinking the story, which I enjoy so much. Now one reason to do this is to control the reception of the narrative; it’s a technique that I use in history lectures occasionally to reinforce the facts vs opinions distinction in elementary historical narratives, and it’s a way to repeat information so that you can be sure that your audience has noticed it. So there can be a useful purpose to it; I am just not yet convinced that we see that here. I’d like to see scenes from different camera angles — instead of the same angles repeated so often. In scenes where Lucas’s perspective shows Beth, Beth’s perspective should show Lucas and vice versa. We don’t see anywhere near enough of that here and it wouldn’t be that hard to do. In particular I found the third retelling, from the perspective of the assassin, essentially superfluous, and my first reaction to the second retelling (from Beth’s perspective) was that it underlined what an implausible plot move it was simply to invite Beth onto the Grid. Seriously, does MI-5 not background check its employees? I had a BF in college who applied to work for the CIA, and I was visited twice by nondescript men in suits (the second time after the relationship was over) and he never even got hired. For me this episode simply escalated the plausibility problems around Beth (once they found out she was lying, why would they trust her in an operation at all? And why would Lucas think, if she had lied, that she would stay in the car when he left her there?). The sum total is that Beth is now completely delegitimated as a sincere narrator. We’re not going to believe anything she says.

It seems possible, of course, that they are using that character to set up a larger problem, with all of these statements about lying near the end of the episode: Lucas: “I want Beth on our team”; Harry: “I don’t like liars”; Lucas: “it’s our business, isn’t it? Lying?”; Harry: “Not to each other.”

Harry (Peter Firth) tells Lucas (Richard Armitage) that Beth has to go after this operation because “there’s no place here for betrayal.”

I like this theme a lot, as I like the scene where Lucas basically claims the position of chief of Section D for himself. It picks up on the discussion in 8.7 between Lucas and Ashok, where Ashok calls Lucas “liar man” and asks how he can trust the word of a liar. Also, the scene is hugely fraught. On the one hand, you have Lucas following up with the management style he’s been using informally for the whole episode, with a person-oriented management that we haven’t seen from most other section chiefs (I haven’t seen any episode w/Adam Carter so I don’t know about him yet, but not from the others); on the other hand we have Lucas saying that Beth deserves a second chance (actually this is a third chance), and one wonders if it’s because he knows that his identity as Lucas North was his own second chance, or because in the back of his mind is the idea that he wants to deserve a second chance with Laila; and then there’s the whole question of trust: Lucas: “Did you trust Ros?”; Harry: “Implicitly”; Lucas: “Could you afford me the same grace?” It’s not clear here what Harry knows about the past of “John,” which we’ve only begun to discover ourselves, but is it going to be a past of betrayal on the same scale as Ros? (and no, I still haven’t seen those episodes either). As Lucas insists on Grade A clearance, there’s a nice move of his eyes up from under his brow so that we catch the significance of this request even if Harry doesn’t. See here:

And then there’s the whole question of what that shake means. Harry says “Congratulations, Lucas,” but it seems to be a bittersweet moment for both of them, as the score in the background seems to signal. It seems clear from Lucas’s face that it’s not really a shake of trust — as if the attempt to create a bond of honesty between two liars is always already undercut, impossible, indeed, a sad form of irony.

But as the scene moves out into the common office area, we continue to the see the multi-layered level of Armitage’s performance — he’s got to manage a lot of different strands of Lucas’s personality and interactions with colleagues at once. Despite the sad tone of the music, at the same time, there’s a genuine, subtle smile here from Lucas that’s not the crafty grin of earlier seasons and episodes.

“Don’t think it’s because I care,” is Lucas’s remark directed at Beth after he informs her that she can stay on in Section D.

The segue to the look of weariness immediately afterwards connects Lucas’s thoughts about Beth (whatever they are) with the sadness of John, whose past Lucas has lost:

But there’s also more than a microexpression of calculation that appears once Beth is gone:

and it ends up, as we see above, directed quite obviously in the direction of Harry’s office.

Armitage’s performance:

On the level of performance: if this episode doesn’t win him a TV BAFTA, I don’t know what will. In general, last week there was an energy to his performance of Lucas that we hadn’t seen for much of S8, and that’s accentuated again here with a crispness of delivery, an openness of style that’s still within the S7 gestural repertoire (not inexplicably outside it, as it often was in S8), and the opportunity for a kind of emotionality in a realistic situation that Armitage’s roles have rarely allowed him. For instance, a glimpse of hope in Lucas’s eyes that we’ve not yet seen, as far as I know, as here, where he glimpses Maya from afar, the first time he’s seen her (apparently) in fifteen years.

Or here, where’s just spoken to her for the first time and she’s touched his chest:

The script and the characterization he’s generating here give him an opportunity for so many more nuanced expressions — a quiet happiness, a sad regret, all with a little nostalgia mixed in. We really see a diverse emotional palette in these scenes that builds on the previous characterization of Lucas and gives us something new to see in his performances of emotionality. We see all the defensive shame with which Armitage invested Lucas during the encounter Elizaveta’s kitchen at the end of 7.2, but stepped up a notch:

So we know this relationship really cuts to the core of who Lucas (in this case, “John”) is. He’s stroking his arms here to self-calm. This entire scene has Armitage pushing “John” to reveal who he is at his core — while simultaneously showing us how hard it is for the professional spy to push aside the accretions of a decade and a half of lying in order to attempt to speak honestly.

I’ll probably write a lot more about this scene eventually — it should definitely go in Mr. Armitage’s show reel — but I’ll bookend it by saying that what makes this intense emotionality believable in the characterization of Lucas (after the disciplined gestural repertoire of S7 and then the frequent bewilderment of S8, which one begins to suspect will be retconned as “the PTSD year”) is that it’s backed up by a new sort of emotional strength in Lucas that we haven’t seen before. At the end of the scene he challenges Maya — if she has a life and doesn’t need him, why did she even come? There’s a calm in Armitage’s portrayal of Lucas here that moves away from the angsty, almost brittle moments of S7 and 8 where we felt Lucas was struggling for control — something that hints of belief, of confidence, of a hope that’s backed up by the sentiment that Lucas / “John” thinks he can get what he wants here.

In sum, a fabulous performance that builds on his earlier strengths in this role but gives us something almost entirely new and yet simultaneously plausible. I can’t say enough good things here.

I know Mr. Armitage has mentioned that he was surprised about having to go to this new place in terms of his character biography and redefine who Lucas is, but I think that whatever is happening here is giving him a new energy in this role. Maybe because it’s not the familiar persona that he’s established, or a fraying of that persona, but a modified characterization that’s inspiring him and giving him food for thought? Maybe because of the re-establishment of the relationship with Maya, and his opportunity to play against someone who was not quickly written out of the script (Elizaveta Starkova), or whose characterization was incomprehensible (Sarah Caulfield), but someone who clearly has a persona with history with Lucas and someone whom he can really play with as opposed to having to create the characterization for both roles himself. I think that what Mr. Armitage is able to do in this episode also relates to a return to a clearly character driven plot in these scripts. He’s got a broader, deeper character here on offer.

One also kind of hopes it will open paths up to him to be cast as a leading man in a film. I want to develop this theme in a separate post later, but I think we’re seeing a dimension of Armitage’s acting here that we haven’t seen before. There was a sense in which the emotional self discipline of S7 Lucas could be read as a sort of mannerism akin to the “pantomime” figure of Guy of Gisborne or the historical drama lead embodied in Mr. Thornton. John Porter never got a chance to be in a real relationship with anyone he cared about over a longer arc; he is only ever shown in detailed relationship with whoever he’s rescuing that particular week, and indeed, this is a fundamental part of that characterization — Porter is the person who can develop quick intimacy with an individual as a sort of moment in an abstract problem related to justice or security or whatever, but he can’t really put himself easily into relationship with people who are going to place more consistent expectations upon him. So there’s a sense in which we’ve never completely seen Armitage in the very human sense that we repeatedly saw in other Spooks leads: Tom Quinn with Ellie, for example. Here he really shows that his style of almost backing away from the screen — of drawing attention to himself in retreat rather than on the offensive — can work in a romantic lead.

I so hope that this series continues on this path and ends well for Armitage in the sense I’ve sketched above. Maybe I’m too euphoric, but this was one of the best episodes of Spooks I’ve ever seen.

OK, enough gushing. Random stuff.

Wondering:

• why does Lucas give up the poison so quickly and without protest? does this have something to do with his reference to Africa in the final scene of this episode? Does he have a closer relationship with the Nigerian attaché than we realize?
• What strange continuity error will Lucas’s flat give rise to this season?
• In the “slap” scene, how did they manage to film it so that she doesn’t appear to be slapping him at all?
• Why can’t they get the Spanish pronunciation of the assassins right (compared to the pronunciation problems with Russian, Spanish is a breeze)?

Like:

• the return to concrete portrayals of the nitty gritty of spying (when they toss the hotel, for example, or in the scenes where they hack the security camera system at Westhouse’s “pile”)
• The slightly snotty tone of Lucas and Harry’s discussion of Beth on their way out to visit Westhouse the first time
• The difficulty of Harry and Ruth’s conversation late night when it threatens to be a “tête à tête”
• the way that they’ve scripted Lucas’s management style and his care for his colleagues. He’s not obtrusive, but after last week he seems to be showing both concern for the wellbeing of his fellow spooks, and an open management style that takes into consideration their ideas and inspirations and preferences for working. With Beth maybe some of this is checking up on her, but even if it turned out to be ineffective, it was nice of him to call her to see how she was.Lucas (Richard Armitage) tells Beth to go home and get some rest. This is actually an expression of concern, but something about his coloring and the dice spots on that wrist makes him look quite Mephistophalean. Lucifer, anyone?

Clothing Armitage:

The suit in the first scene doesn’t look bad if you don’t look too closely.

All the way through this scene he’s holding the paper right in front of his waist; it’s like he knows the coat doesn’t fit right at the waist. And then there’s the rear view:

Given the extra breadth in the shoulders (though why is this jacket pulling at the upper arm? Is this Lucas having to deal with remnants of John Porter’s muscles?) it’s hard to see why the waist should be too small. And once again there’s some weird issue with the skirt of the jacket, like it’s been let out and not pressed.

The jacket is still poorly fitted here, but look at that shirt. Almost perfect. Scrumptious — focuses attention on that flat abdomen and its elongation into the hips:

Here’s a close up: buttons well placed at the collar, and no rippling across the upper chest:

Can I also say that I love Lucas dressed way down, as in this scene where he encounters Leila in the exam room of her hospital (even though this is not the jacket he was wearing in the parking lot only seconds earlier, which is permapress and probably nylon. Does Spooks have no continuity people? Presumably they should be able to keep the clothing straight with the help of a notebook.)

This is TOTALLY gratuitous. I actually got it while I was trying to see if I could get a shot of those great big boots Lucas wears into the penthouse suite.

Making Armitage up:

I do like the slightly different sculpting of the jaw via stubble shaving. (Here’s the commentator who alerted me to that issue; it’s worth clicking because it is highly interesting.) A much more geometrical result that reigns in both the hinge of the jaw and the prominence of the chin in comparison to the pattern established S8, making Lucas look a great deal less obstinate than he often looked last year. The haircut here also seems much more square, trim, pricey, as opposed to last week’s rather dashing look. (With the tendency of Armitage’s quite fine hair to clump and curl at the hairline on the neck, this very precise cut suits him well and gives him a similar economy of style to Ros. I always felt like the women on Spooks had expensive haircuts and the men had cheap ones. This now seems contravened. Armitage’s haircut is now keeping pace.)

Freeing up the face visually also gives Armitage a bit more room for his emotions on his face — the scaled back hair and more restrained jaw really lets his consternation come out here because our attention is focused on the bridge of the nose and the eyes:

Occasionally, he almost achieves the peaked, jagged look that Lucas had in S7, all those sharp corners in his face:

Camera angles:

Loved this top down camera angle in the elevator — from a show that IMO has a relatively conventional camera style, apart from the heavy use of handheld, which I hate.

Another great series of shots: the contrasting elevators as Lucas and the Nigerian assassin descend from the penthouse in the Maybury hotel. Very visually exciting.

A nice graphic from the “hacking the Westhouses’ CCTV setup” sequence:

Also in this scene, I really like the addition of the threatening tone of the synthesized bass to the background music (I’m usually neutral to negative on the Spooks score, frankly, but here it really works).

The effect of backlighting makes Lucas’s ears look almost translucent (this note is for you, Jane):

This is series is now one quarter over. If it’s going to keep on at this level, I should already be regretting that we’ve seen so much of it.

~ by Servetus on September 28, 2010.