Finally the Latin comes in handy [Spooks 9.1-.3 spoilers!]

[Same disclaimers as before. My caps unless otherwise noted.] This got long, as I wanted to document all my reactions before I started reading what others thought.

Yeah, that’s my big insight for the day. Though “pactum serva” means something more like “keep the vow” or “stick to the agreement” as opposed to “keep the faith,” which is kind of a sloppy rendering. That awful grad reading knowledge class and years of stumbling through neo-Latin texts have finally paid off. 🙂 NOT.

THAT KISS. OH, THAT KISS. MR. THORNTON, YOU HAVE SERIOUS COMPETITION.

And yes, I was again within a hair’s breadth of crying at the end of this episode. And not just because of the final scene. Because of Dr. Kirby’s belief that he could control his knowledge; because of Meg’s murder; because of Ruth and Harry’s interactions. Because of the really satisfying narrative shape of this segment. And because Lucas/John still somehow thinks he can recapture the past in the wake of all of these developments — indeed that anyone can kiss to recall the past in such a sordid world.

Series 9: It’s like the writers got their groove back.

The script:

Pactum serva, and variations on it, and questions about the keeping and breaking of promises, are the theme for 9.3. I loved this aspect of the episode. Seriously, they just keep getting better, and there was plenty of plot and plenty of character development in this piece, something for everyone except possibly fans of the newbies, and yet we saw a tremendously revealing scene from Beth — I almost grew to like her. The sequence of lies uttered by the various characters was an intriguing counterpoint to the theme of keeping promises; can we lie in order to keep our promises?

9.3 gets a positive review although I felt that the episode began very weakly, with a random computer picture of a satellite:

Wasn’t this a weird way to start out the episode? Just a random insertion of a CGI picture of earth from orbit? I was wondering if the spooks were undertaking some interplanetary espionage!

I suppose I should be grateful that they didn’t repeat the cut-rate Rashomon effect from last week. However, I do not like made up Central Asian or former Soviet republics as plot devices, not in a show that prides itself on guessing what the next big global flareup is going to be. This was just cheap and lazy. I know the scriptwriters probably think it would be too much work to actually learn something about the complexity of the situation in regions that are engaged in trying to separate themselves from the Russian federation, but this sort of portrayal on TV contributes to stereotypes that it’s just some of “those” people engaged in trying to free themselves from their “evil” Russian overlords. The questions involved are much more complex than just the efforts of some stringy-haired terrorists to separate from some post-imperialist villains, and they are actually interesting for geopolitical reasons that would be relevant to the show. And frankly there’s no reason, at least from what we know at this point, that this story would have had to concern terrorist separatists in Central Asia specifically. It’s just that it’s easier for us as Westerners to pity them; the show makes a cheap appeal to the remnants of our Cold War fears of Russia.

It doesn’t help in this regard that the first loyalty conflict, the first problem in keeping promises, is the sniping between Harry and the new Home Secretary. Because we sympathize with Harry we’re likely to see this as a true failure of the new British coalition government to keep faith with the past. (Quite deft that they were able to use the treason of the old Home Secretary to accommodate the historical results of the May 2010 general elections, though.) And that is a past, as Harry describes it, in which the UK and Russia were enemies — something we Westerners are already likely to believe. In the end, however, I found the complexity of this plotline, particularly as the loyalty issues began to affect Harry’s working relationship and ongoing romantic questions with Ruth, to be satisfying.

“Harry, we have to work together.” “We are working together, Ruth. This is what it looks like.”

What is the definition of loyalty? Ruth’s attempt to protect Harry by going around his back? Harry’s faithfulness to old commitments, which is juxtaposed with Viktor’s faithfulness to his old commitments — itself involving a breaking of an agreement over the operation? Then the world will never change.

“That was NOT part of the deal,” Lucas shouts as he witnesses the murder of the AFF terrorists at the hands of Viktor Barenshik and the FSB. The symbolic transgression here is weighty, as Lucas and Viktor have just drunk a toast to further cooperations. (Ongoing plot problem: what exactly is Lucas’s relationship to the FSB? Has his double agency just been dropped?)

Keeping one’s loyalties to the past plays right into the hands of the Russians; Harry’s decision to let Azis Aibek go just brings the problems in Azakstan to London. What’s left, when the keeping of promises is no longer practicable? And why is that Azis, the terrorist, keeps his promises so consistently in this episode — his loyalty to his country, his agreement to help out MI-5 — even as he tortures Dr. Kirby and Meg? I wondered if the cut from Aziz limping around London in search of Dr. Kirby to the flash of Lucas dashing into Thames House to then call Maya involved an implication about remaining faithful to past promises.

Promises kept vs promises broken piles itself up until the viewer’s head is spinning. Dr. Kirby’s pact with Dr. Omosheva, across the lines of loyalty set up between the USSR and the UK during the Cold War. The curiously sweet Meg Kirby, MSc, PhD, is the best promise keeper — pactum serva — and she dies for it. (It seriously killed me that she was saved by the spooks and then died at Viktor’s hands.)

Meg Kirby (Amanda Hale) as she refuses to tell Azis Aibek (Jonathan Aris) the location of the Paroxocybin in Spooks 9.3. This torture and Meg’s subsequent death at the hands of Viktor are pretty much the worst possible death that Servetus can imagine. This, like Lucas’s suicide scene in 8.4, were extremely difficult for me to watch at all.

Because when you force someone to make a vow with you, to you, you subject them to all of your own vulnerabilities, and yourself to theirs; their ability to keep the vow depends not only you but on them. Dr. Kirby thinks he is invulnerable, but he, like all humans, is susceptible to the passage of time and the winding round of the historical clock. Our enemies become our friends, and our bodies pass away. Passing on a promise only subjects your interlocutor to the same process against which you tried to insulate yourself. Meg dies for the promise she made her father. He seems to affirm this even in his own pain over what he can only guess is happening to her.

Dr. Kirby (Donald Sumpter) hangs up his cell phone (rings off his mobile) in response to Aibek’s demands to learn the location of the Paroxocybin after his daughter has assured him that she will keep her vow, in Spooks 9.3. Is it a luxury or a curse to serve a G-d of such obdurate principle?

In the end, it seems that only a cascade of lies will allow people to keep their vows. Viktor lies about Meg’s death and Lucas’s intuitive grasp that he’s lying sets off a chain of deceptions that move us more and more quickly to the end of the episode. It’s interesting that this sequence is cut through with Ruth’s attempts to reassure Harry about his decision to let Aibek go, which she characterizes as potentially a failure of judgment but not one of decency; “sometimes you have to do what’s necessary,” a morally ambiguous statement if I’ve ever heard one. Keep the promise, or break it?

Viktor lies about Meg’s death; Harry lies to Dr. Kirby about Meg’s persistence in keeping her promise; Lucas offers Aibek a way to pursue his goals, apparently without telling him about the likelihood of negative consequences; the spooks lie to Victor about the location and transfer of the Paroxocybin. Indeed, one senses that all promises are null and void as Viktor reiterates Lucas’s line from the beginning of the episode in response to the request that he come to witness the destruction of the “real” Paroxocybin: “That was not the deal, Lucas” — the line of Lucas’s that marked the first transgressed agreement.

It’s hard to know what to think about Lucas at the end of the episode. On the one hand, it’s hard to credit that he could seriously be surprised that Viktor would assassinate Aibek. His shock is only very slight in that part of the scene. What comes to outweigh what one suspects would have been a previous moral reservation about all of this is the end of the scene: as Beth, in a moment that makes me really like her character, prepares to murder Viktor in retribution for the murder of Meg Kirby, Viktor says, “Lucas, tell the new recruit how the world works.” Lucas’s expression here can only be described as a pained sneer:

“I already have,” he replies, covering Viktor as Beth despatches him.

In the end, it’s Viktor who ends up clinging pointlessly to faith in what he understands as the social contract of the world of spies, even as Lucas now refuses to keep it, ending the encounter with a performance worthy of a BAFTA on a faked videotape from Viktor’s shoulder holster camera. The Paroxocybin is notionally put into the hands of the AFF, and Viktor receives a posthumous military decoration for something he wasn’t actually doing. Harry plays a charade that the Russian ambassador is forced to accept — thus putting the international players back into the position of the commitments with which they started the show. Stalemate.

Finally we turn back to the vows, the promises, the faiths of the spooks in their private arrangements, wondering how any of these people can be trusted to keep them. Harry revokes his earlier lie to Kirby about Meg’s betrayal, replacing it with the ostensibly true information that the Paroxocybin is now safe in the hands of the state, and justifying it with claims that Kirby is honorable. I wonder whether Kirby’s honor will be impacted by the loss of his contract partner, his promise keeper. It seems like an ideal plot point to move on from: when the honorable are betrayed, they are tempted to act without honor. Harry says things that suggest that a major motivator in his decision to tell Kirby where the Paroxocybin really is was his desire to prove to Ruth “who he really is.” Then there’s Lucas’s encounter with Vaughn, who lets drop the word “Albany” as some information he wants; Lucas refuses to give it, makes implications about agreements in the past that have ruined lives, and taunts Vaughn to break Lucas’s faith with Harry Pearce.

There’s a hardness, a readiness for cruelty that I recognize here myself, that comes from the belief that no matter how desperate one’s one situation, that of the interlocutor is worse. It’s frightening, and again a facet of Lucas that is now emerging more clearly.

And then, of course, there’s the tantalizing idea that promises made years before and lying dormant all that time can be reawakened to full flower. That people can remember, and be completed. That a kiss will wake Sleeping Beauty and free her from her slumbers. It’s just not entirely clear what this oh so moving kiss — the touch of the lips of a man who can be moved after so long to determined action by the mere glance of a photograph, and the possessor of a faith so strong in love that he is able to insist on getting what he wants — will suggest to us about the capacity of humans to keep their promises. He tells Maya that he will never disappear again. Ever. That’s an awfully big promise for a spook, and he’s already been unable to keep it once.

Mr. Armitage’s performance:

I didn’t think he could top the last scene of 9.2, but I was absolutely wrong about that. Mr. Armitage, if you keep on giving performances like this one I’ll follow you to Captain America and beyond.

First, I was really pleased with the brief teaser of the phone call — I assume this is primarily there to remind us to be patient for info about Lucas / “John” and Maya. I also have to admit that I was watching the status bar on my Quicktime and worrying, as the minutes rolled past, that not enough time would be left to treat this issue and that we’d have to wait a whole ‘nother week to find out what happened between them. Thankfully not.

The timing of eye motions was something I noticed a lot this week. This must be something unconscious rather than planned. As Lucas calls Maya, the only point in the long walk up in the hallways where he blinks is when he’s saying her name. Intimacy of saying “it’s me” introduces the pattern of the facial expressions in this short scene between confidence / determination and sadness / despair / longing.

“It’s me.” Determination.

Response to Maya’s command that John should “just leave [her] alone.” Sadness / weariness.

Back on track; note the slight clenching on the left side of the mouth (Armitage character emotion usually comes from the left of Armitage’s face) and in the moving picture we can see him clencing on the right as well — as with the blinking in 9.2., here the muscle movement is not so much an indication of an emotion but an indication of an emotion John is fighting with. Insistence: “I want to see you again.”

But then a key move in the Armitage facial repertoire — the very slight back off once a strong assertion has been put forth. Here we see tension in the muscle across John’s chin, slight movement of the lips almost toward lip biting / licking (nervousness language for Armitage). Prelude for his next statement, which is the insistent: “I want to tell you everything. Tonight.”

Camera switch to Maya, who says she doesn’t want to see him. Reply: “I don’t believe you. I’m texting you my address.” Then camera cuts back to John, so we just catch his own response to having put himself forward with the announcement of the text message.

Once he says he’s texting her, we see just a hint of the nervous swallow, and then we’re back to this look of determination with the economically held jaw, the forehead muscles tensing. Note that he holds his eyes open all the way through these shots. But the the big reveal:

The blink finally comes with a whole facial microexpression. Hard to see this in the video, but it looks like a combination of exhaustion, sadness, and concentration. Perhaps hoping that saying it will make it so.

It’s another of his typical facial expressions — almost pushing out whatever emotion it is that he’s feeling before he crinkles the forehead and opens his eyes to make another assertion: “Whatever happens…

[insert affirmative statement / conveyance of reliable information face] “…I am not going to disappear again. Ever.”

Then, intriguingly, his face seems to move to a self-evaluation of his own effect, as he listens for a response and doesn’t get one, then “rings off.” In three steps:

Eye position one.

Eye position two.

Eye position three, with very slight lowering of the eyebrows in concentration or determination again.

Second, and on a very different note, Mr. Armitage’s greater grace and comfort in action scenes continues to be evident. John Porter läßt grüßen. Thanks for sharing your acumen with our favorite super-spy, Sergeant Porter. Love these confident, dance-like moves and stances that we now see from time to time, as in the approach to Kirby’s office:

It’s worth looking in slomo how he sets up that door kick with his previous footwork: very elegant and economical. I also like the way that you can see Lucas breathing through his mouth in these frames in the hallway — not exertion, but tension / foreboding. Subtle but convincing. In general, I think we’re seeing a bit more physical energy on the grid, suggesting that Lucas has a more energetic leadership style as opposed to the cool as a cucumber demeanor that Ros cultivated (think of how calmly she coordinated the defusing of the bombs in 7.3, for instance).

Third, I’m also enjoying seeing this rather harder Lucas — a hardness that seems to speak from confidence rather than frustration (as in series 8) in his interactions with Viktor and Vaughn (discussed above). First of all, it’s something that we are inclined to believe must be true of him: how could all those years in prison not have made someone who was cold and calculating all along, as Elizaveta surmises in 7.2, even colder at the center of his being? The scene with Vaughn is very gesturally and expressionally economical — Lucas’s anger and perhaps developing rage at being pushed to give something he doesn’t want to is less nuanced than his conflictedness about Maya, perhaps — but it was interesting to me how the entrancing issue with eye focus that we discussed previously as something that draws us to his face in romantic scenes can also function here to draw the viewer in in fascination with his anger or resentment. There’s a way that the left side of his face indicates a volcano about to erupt even as the right side of it looks like an iron shield. And, of course, the harder Lucas makes the softer John stand out even more. We hope we’ll find out, soon, what happened to turn John into Lucas, not just in terms of plot, but also in terms of personality — and we remain hopeful that in the ways that matter, Lucas can turn back into John.

So now, to the part that will lead to obsessive replay of this episode till next week and beyond. It took me so long to write this that I am sure the fangrrrl barometers all over the web are already rising like crazy to indicate fair weather even without my participation. What a stunning scene, this last kiss. It’s also going to merit further analysis later in detail, but I just, just, just, loved this, not least because last week, just when you thought that Armitage couldn’t open up his gestural repertoire for Lucas any further than he already had, we see him opening up even more in a very convincing way that is nonetheless not inconsistent with whom we understand Lucas / John to be. As I discuss this particular issue, I’m going to indicate some of my favorite moments.

First, as kaprekar already noted elsewhere, there’s the stance. I think looking at this as our starting point is definitive for understanding the way that Armitage is developing the characterization of John out of the scaffolding for Lucas. Fascinating. John realizes he’s in the red here in terms of needing to have a good explanation for something that’s inherently inexplicable, and is going to have to pony up, but as the scene progresses we see that he’s still chipping away at pieces of Lucas in order to get at John.

Compare first to where we left John in the last scene of 9.2. Insofar as John is still fighting to come out, Armitage can’t yet quite completely shed Lucas’s gestural repertoire — esp the crossed arms — but his contrasting use of it points to struggle. We note this very painful moment which would be consistent with Lucas’s defensive posture:

But the real substance of the scene, in terms of stance, seems to go to show that John can only speak with courage when his arms are down and his center of gravity is fully exposed and thus vulnerable to Maya, to wit:

When he sees her coming When, after he tells her that he wanted to come home, he has to accept her statement that she can’t listen to him

When he exposes his pain to her

When he challenges her as to why came to see him.

In the scene in question in 9.3, the photographer is shooting through the panes of the patio door, and it’s notable that shooting through glass is a technique used repeatedly in Spooks 7 to hide Lucas’s emotion from us, for example at the death of Dean Mitchell in 7.6 or the injury of Ossetik (sp?) in 7.4. We see this from afar perhaps because it would be too much for us to see it up close at this point. But the posture in these scenes seems directly related to John’s posture at the end of 9.2, which is alternately open, self-shielding, or surrendering. Obviously, Armitage gets some help here from the editor, I think. I’m not attributing all of what’s below to him, but nonetheless he provides the most important pieces.

Lucas’s usual beginning posture in a scene like this (as with Elizaveta in 7.2) usually involves crossed arms and self-calming. Defensiveness that points to the desire to make excuses or hide his own faults by going on the offensive. Here, in contrast, for John, it’s the hands that are prominent — supplication and nervousness. Leaning to the left in disequilibrium, uncertainty, hope that he will be believed.

More posture equilibrium here but the hands are now clasped closer to the body. Self reassurance, but still hoping against hope. Why doesn’t she turn around and look at me?

She’s not going to look back. As Maya walks further into the room, John now gives in to disequilibrium, leaning his shoulders against the door frame, with hands still in the nervous, begging position.

In order for John to answer in this open stance that Armitage has been establishing for him, the arms have to come down. The cameraman helps us by switching to a shot that’s not mediated by the window. the arm motion signals that while he’s still holding himself back, he’s ready to try to take the rhetorical offensive. But the open stance can’t completely disarm Lucas; as John goes to answer her question about why he let her believe he was dead, we see some of Lucas’s defensiveness reemerging:

As he loops his hand into his jeans pocket, he’s still using the leaning posture (incidentally, which we saw last on the balcony of the American church in 8.5 in interaction with Sarah Caulfield) but he straightens up quickly:

“I went to prison for eight years, is that good enough?”

Camera again retreats to the patio of the house, and we can see why as the stance becomes more defeated here, again. Head and shoulders position seems to indicate shame.

The questioning goes on, and there are some fantastic microexpressions — did he kill someone? No. Hurt someone? Was he innocent? No. A nicely percussive rhetoric from the scripted dialogue, and it allows for a really pained expression that speaks loads.

This is all the more effective for us because having seen Spooks 7 and 8, we know what John is remembering here of Lucas’s experiences while Maya does not — and he must also be asking himself yet again, albeit briefly, about whether abandoning his identity as John — which we now know was a move in response to some serious problem — was really worth the huge cost of being Lucas North. And yet Maya’s tone indicates that she doesn’t believe him.

Then Armitage ratchets John’s emotions up a significant notch, as Maya asks him why he decided to reappear now. At first it seemed to me like too much — we see Lucas’s “severe emotional distress” sign appear:

At first I’m shocked, as Armitage moves John directly from one of Lucas’s frequent poses (worldweariness in response to the frightening events of his life) into what for Lucas would be deep emotionality. BUT, and this is key, what we’d expect from Lucas here (and to some extent that is signaled by the forehead crinkles and the measured stroking of the face) would be some sort of rationalization or defensiveness–and it would be signaled by the quick removal of the hand from the face, as if in embarrassment that he’d been seen in such emotionality. The script takes John elsewhere — into the stunning admission that he’s willing to risk Lucas’s existence over something he remembered after seeing her in a photograph — and the performance goes right along with this, as Armitage makes John take three steps across the room as the pitch of his voice rises significantly from Lucas’s normal timbre, with his voice eventually breaking during this admission before he can reestablish a level of meta-control on his emotions:

The suddenly blinking eyes — so noticeably after the concentration with which John has been answering Maya’s questions — signal the unwillingness to cry, the unwillingness to make this an unhappy moment even as Armitage reaches a moment of vulnerability that we’ve seldom seen him attain on screen. Eventually he’s able to return to a coherent statement about himself, that the years he spent trying to forget all returned when he saw the photo, and that he knew he had to see her. There’s a little moment of joy as he recollects the falling away of all that forgetfulness, too. This then generates one of those unforgettable Armitage moments, one of the reasons we stay at our computers watching him so closely. I don’t know if you can see it, but as he responds to the question of whether his story is true, he stares at her, again with open eyelids all the way, his head rises just a touch, he breathes in, and his left eye opens just slightly wider, as if he’s saying “of course” and “how can you doubt me” and “this is one of the most important things I could ever say to you” all at the same time.

“Every word.”

I’m loving what I see here about the gestural and microexpressional relationship of John to Lucas, and to me, this expansion on the framework Armitage built for John in the last episode is almost better than the kiss.

ALMOST. BECAUSE THAT IS ONE AMAZING KISS.

I’ll save more for a dedicated post on this kiss, because I am SO tired, but some favorite moments:

The way he cranes his head in to look at her directly as he urges her to close her eyes.

The lean in, the point at which he realizes he is going to get this thing he’s been dreaming of — the surrender equally to desire and the fantasy of the past.

The one last look he takes at her, before initiating the kiss that is going to change everything.

The slowest possible beginning.

The second lean in — this is akin to how Guy kissed Marian for the first time in series 2 of Robin Hood — as if he hadn’t quite realized at first what was going on but one he did he leaned in to make it even more intense.

The engulfing quality of his passion for Maya, as if the kiss is secondary to his need to surround her with his body.

Man oh man oh man.

Clothing Armitage:

First, I really like the commando style in silhouette — wish we could have seen more. Love all those straps and snaps. There’s also something cool about that camera. Makes him look like a super-hero. Foreshadowing?

Second, the Belstaff jacket is still doing very well, if fitted a bit tightly across the shoulders in an action stance:
but there a funny moment when we see Lucas reinsert his gun in his jeans waistband and then pull the jacket down (on right side of photo below). Nervousness? Or too much rideup from a tight jacket?

Third, John’s shirt has a western yoke. Ride ’em cowboy! Also, one of the rare times we’ve seen him in a button-front shirt without a t-shirt underneath. Urizen is visible. An interesting way of bringing attention the question of fate in the dissolution and reestablishment of this relationship, and the matter of human control and decisionmaking vs divine prerogatives. (See, I have been skimming that Blake biography.) But mostly, I was intrigued by the casual shirt choice. And yes, I am sure that I am the only fangrrl who slomowed back and forth in this scene to find the best possible view of the western yoke as it’s exemplified in the rear view of the shoulder.

What can I say? We Texans-by-choice really like to see those western yoke shirts. Grin.

Miscellaneous:

Though I’m sure it’s convenient for the cameraman, would a spy really have a residence where this much of the inside is visible, even from the garden? (Lucas seems to be living in a house now, at least. Yes, a very American prejudice. Though I myself live in an apartment.) People who live in glass houses?

Law-abiding Lucas and Beth show their badges to get into the tube. I really wanted Lucas to jump the barriers. When I’ve been in the tube and seen that there’s always an exciting uproar that’s fun to watch. In no way am I advocating illegal behavior, however. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

Is this really a university? Seems awfully clean and kept up. We’re always hearing over here in what bad shape the London universities are in terms of crumbling facilities. I’d love an office as nice as Dr. Kirby’s.

3/8 over. I’m already dreading the end.

Attention, Spooks scriptwriters: pactum serva. Don’t mess this up.

~ by Servetus on October 5, 2010.