Don’t do it, Lucas! [Spooks 9.1-9.4 spoilers!]

Same disclaimers. My caps. I’ve been noticing while I’ve been drafting this that the comments are piling up on an earlier post. Sorry I couldn’t write faster, gang! I had some professorial responsibilities to fulfill.

I’ve got slightly less to say this week, mostly because I didn’t find the episode plot anywhere near as interesting as last week’s. It was marginally more complex in terms of plot elements, but the meta-theme (control, manipulation, self-control, who’s moving who) was in general much less compelling for me, at least as I understand it at present. Several times, however, I found myself thinking that this episode couldn’t really be as simple as it appeared while watching. It felt like “The Two Towers” and I wondered whether its primary purpose was to set up plot elements that will become crucial in the future, so that later I’ll be hitting myself on the forehead for not having noticed things now. Too much watching of Spooks has made me, like Mr. Armitage, a little paranoid. The closing flash photo, referenced above, underlined that impression. We’re halfway through the series — already — and the viewer is being set up for the endgame.

The episode:

After the title sequence, nice beginning in what now really does seem to be the bedroom in Lucas’s flat, although if that’s true, there should be a light source from a window behind the viewer’s left shoulder. Or else Lucas rearranged the furniture and hung a shutter since the suitcase scene. Or it’s a different room. Whatever. Why I get so hung up about continuity errors with Lucas’s flat is beyond me.

The contrast is palpable, of course, between the atmosphere of re-established trust between Maya and John and the fact that he is indeed lying to her, not just by omission, but via the statement that he works in private security consulting. The last scene we saw with these two felt like John and Maya; now it feels like John’s ceded the room to Lucas, down to the passive aggressive hint that he thought she was the one who needed to get back to her life. (You may need to leave, dear, but don’t rush!) It’s the kind of scene where you wish it hadn’t been shot in such low lighting so you could see more of the expressions on Lucas’s face, but at the same time the lighting is supposed to signal the murkiness of the situation and the drowsiness of the lovers, I think.

Nice move on Maya’s part, as she withdraws a bit when Lucas leans in to kiss her and mentions that the plan he remembers that she had to open a tapas bar was a long time ago. Oh, Lucas. I hope that getting to be John again, if you’re even able to realize that, as well as everything you’ll do later in this episode to achieve it, is worth this woman. She seems nice enough, but you’re still the one I really care about.

Once he leaves the bedroom, he’s completely Lucas again, down to the careful stance and his perimeter scan of his yard, and only appears to be acting as John — he has to switch from his hyperalertness back to the sheepish smile of the slightly drowsy lover, and it looks like an effort. But he’s not in control, anymore — as he moves into being able to move Maya, he’s being played by Vaughn.

The oh-so-obvious and nonetheless convincing iconic shot of Spooks 9.4, I think: Lucas the spy on the left vs. John the lover on the right, with Maya unaware of the knife in his hand. Loved this. Although I am basically still not convinced Maya is good enough for you, Lucas / John, I do admit that I like how she kisses you, as if you’re a particularly tasty treat she can’t get enough of, a citrus fruit out of which she’s trying to suck every last drop of juice. Whoever you turn out to be and whatever awful crime you’re about to commit or be implicated in, I still believe at this point that you deserve to find the love you’re willing to make all these sacrifices for. Because betraying MI-5 is a pretty big sacrifice, given your alleged eight years in Russian prison, and then again, especially given what you said to Beth in episode 1. Oh, Lucas.

So on the control narrative arc: before the title, we have 3 Chinese hitpersons entering the UK, and the question is how MI-5 is going to control events. The solution: Beth’s developing asset, Kai. Lucas and Harry push her here, and she’s eager to be pushed, as she wants to be accepted. She’s rushed into things. After a bizarre scene with the Home Secretary that once again seems to underline the new government’s incompetence, we see the actual person who’s being controlled here, the scientist Jiang Li, who seems to be in the company of CIA men. Not only can Harry not move the Home Secretary, he can’t move Alton Beecher, the CIA person he speaks to, to give him any more information. Given that the spooks have no more options, Kai’s apparent unwillingness to be run by Beth  — he seems genuinely hurt by her revelation of who she really is — reads as disappointing to both her and the team. Lucas designs an end run around their information problem: burgling the Chinese Embassy. Oh, wait, maybe Kai is willing to help, as he calls to notify Beth that an alarm has gone off and that her team is about to be captured. We again see Lucas’s intelligence and care for his team, as he sets himself up to be arrested as a burglar to get Dmitri off the roof of the embassy.

They regroup and guess what: another slightly obscure mythological reference! Neat how the profiteers and villains of the world are always making reference to classical antiquity. That will keep people like me in business as authors of reference works to be consulted by profiteers and villains — and the people who write tv dramas about them — if nothing else. (I did recognize Amphitrite, but not the other big cultural reference of the episode.) “Amphitrite” is a valuable and badly needed water desalinization technology. The Home Secretary expresses mystification — mystification, I tell you! — that England might get pushed around by China. Uch, as I write this I am seeing already how little general sympathy I have for the narrative arc of this episode …

Just as Beth, Dmitri and Lucas are trying to move Kai to continue to help them, Vaughn is taking the last step he needs to move Lucas to get the information he needs, by insisting that he himself is only being moved by others.

Vaughn (Iain Glen) tells Lucas he has to have the Albany file in order to fulfill “silly promises” he has made, and promises that if he gets it, he’ll disappear forever and leave John free to live whatever life he wants, in Spooks 9.4.

Kai is polygraphed and seems to be telling the truth about whose side he’s on. This scene is then cut back to Lucas’s first attempt to get the Albany file, in which he seems to plan to log on as himself to get it, and then backs off and steps away from the terminal. I was SO hoping that this was going to be his final step in the direction of betrayal, but the narrative from last week means that I had to be wrong, of course.

Then we move to QMK, which refuses to be moved by Harry to check its security or help him out. Here, I loved that Ruth got to get off the grid and do some spying herself.

Ruth Evershed (Nicola Walker) on her way to penetrate the QMK computer systems in Spooks 9.4. Second best quip of the day: “You try remembering the Mandarin for ‘quark’.” Especially since the Mandarin for “quark” seems to sound an awful lot like “quark.” Best quip of the day at the end of the post.

Here, the big control game of the episode finally goes into motion: in trying to control QMK and prevent whatever the CSS hitpeople are going to do, Ruth tries to infiltrate the lab to install a hack that will give MI-5 access to QMK’s computers. Just as this gets underway, Kai calls Beth to tell her that there’s a bomb at QMK. This information causes Lucas to conclude that the goal is to destroy the desalinization technology, so to evacuate the building, except Ruth doesn’t want to go, so she presses a fire alarm and takes another look at the computer she’s hacked. She discovers that Amphitrite is Jiang Li. Lucas now concludes that it’s not a bomb, it’s an assassination, that’s being planned for QMK. Harry tells Ruth to locate the scientist and get out of the building. At this point Ruth more or less has given up her volition, as while looking for Jiang Li, she runs into the CIA who are running her, and essentially becomes a ping-pong ball between the CIA agent and Harry. Everyone at QMK runs away from the building and goes to a CIA safehouse together, except Lucas realizes too late that the CIA agents shouldn’t have been able to get a GPS signal from their HQ, and the Chinese break in and steal Jiang Li. Yup, they’ve all been manipulated, down to being tricked into burgling the Chinese embassy in order to get the information they needed. Sorry, Lucas, that night in the cell really was for nothing.

“We’ve been manipulated by a foreign superpower on our own soil,” Harry concludes in Spooks 9.4, “not only with ease, but with contempt.”

The spooks, from Harry to Lucas all the way down to Beth, hoist on their own petard, are humiliated. Obvious clue dropped to Lucas’s behavior: Ruth’s noticed he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. And then the awful, awful scene. The one where Lucas lays the groundwork to log on as someone else to get it and then covers his tracks by creating a computer trail of bribery. It almost reads like a knee jerk reaction; Lucas has just lost face after a series of bad decisions, and the first poor schmuck he runs into becomes his fall guy —  22-year-old Stephen Owen. We saw last week how Lucas could use Azis to achieve his ends; now he’s instrumentalizing people on his own side to pursue his own goals. Oomph. But WHY can we see Stephen’s password?

The show gives us several seconds to look at this image on the electronic coversheet of the Albany file, so it must be significant. I didn’t recognize it. I’m sure there are some Spooks experts out there who do.

The control issues go on. Harry discovers that indeed the Home Secretary isn’t quite the idiot he seemed to be in their last two encounters, and knew about the CIA involvement all along. Manipulated by a politician, Harry! Beth, emotionally devastated by the failure of her attempt to manipulate Kai, witnesses Lucas’s reveal that Kai had betrayed his own brother to the Chinese authorities during the Tienanmen protests. As Kai insists, “I have been a good traitor,” Lucas, the good man, betrays Stephen and MI-5.

Caught by a flicker on screen that Stephen has a history degree, I decided to cap this. Then I discovered that he’d been serving as an agent since was fourteen years old. Nice work if you can get it.

It’s sophisticated story weaving and editing, but it all seems so tiresomely conventional to me. The only vaguely interesting point in the plot emerges at this point, insofar as Beth decides that her instincts indeed can’t be wrong and that there has to be another dimension to Kai’s story. And it’s only interesting in light of how the episode ends (see below). Why is it at this point that we’re supposed to believe Kai, when he’s been lying — albeit in response to the manipulations of the CSS — all along? It’s all beyond his control, and he moves from the control of the Chinese to the control of MI-5 with little apparent reluctance.

I’ll talk about the next two scenes  — Lucas delivering the information to Vaughn, and then running to the health care facility to inform Maya that now they can be together — more in the chunk on Mr. Armitage’s performance, so I’ll just insert a nice thumb shot here for our delectation.

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) transfers the drive with the Albany file to Vaughn in Spooks 9.4. I hope now that everyone realizes I am starting to make fun of myself with these frequent pictures of Mr. Armitage’s thumbs. At least I hope that is what I am doing.

The main thing that arouses my attention in both of these scenes is that Lucas is starting to appear like he has the worst judgment of all the spooks. It’s a sad repeat of series 8, on some level. Yes, Beth made the mistake of believing or trusting her asset, but Lucas jumps to conclusion after conclusion in the QMK sequence and it’s unclear to me why he should think that the manipulation to which he’s being subjected should stop when this file is transferred. Does he not understand (a) how blackmail works and (b) that he’s now made himself even more blackmailable? He’s manipulated by Vaughn, and then he immediately goes running off to Maya as if he’s really free now. But Lucas North of all people should realize that you’re never really free of your past. Severe script plausibility problem here.

And then we run into the end of the manipulation game. MI-5 have manipulated the Chinese into thinking that the British government is going to seize Jiang Li, so that the Chinese will move her. The Chinese initiate the move, along with the repatriation of Kai.

Jiang Li (Daphne Cheung) listens as Kai (Benedict Wong) tells her that they have no power to decide their fates in Spooks 9.4.

In response, MI-5 step in and rescue Jiang Li and Kai, except that they are stopped in their tracks as the Chinese ambassador threatens London with a bomb. Harry’s concerned that they are once again being manipulated, so he orders Section D to figure it out, meanwhile consulting the Home Secretary, who’s unsurprisingly still willing to give up Jiang Li, who reflects here and in a later conversation with Ruth that she’s accepted her fate.

Jiang Li (Daphne Cheung) tells Kai (Benedict Wong) that they have no power to decide their fates in Spooks 9.4.

In an amazing sequence of coincidences, Tariq is able to locate and Dmitri is able to defuse the bomb so that London is saved. Kai somehow manages to disarm one of the CSS hitpersons long enough to prevent the CSS from escaping with him and Jiang Li. After this, when the CIA is supposed to get both of the Chinese, Ruth protests, and Harry embraces the same nihilism that the Chinese have earlier. (I have to say I’m glad it’s not the Chinese, or I’d have had to start wondering whether the cultural stereotypes of the scriptwriters about the Chinese aren’t as severe as their prejudices about Americans.)

“Well, we’re all being moved around by someone, Ruth,” Harry concludes near the end of Spooks 9.4.

Harry orders Beth to let Kai off where he wants to go, and that ends up being the Chinese embassy. In the penultimate scene, Ruth remarks on Stephen Owen’s apparent betrayal, and after expressing disbelief, Lucas ends with the rather eerie statement, given what he knows about it the truth behind the incident, that “a traitor’s a traitor.” And then he looks around as if to see if anyone finds his reaction incredible. And at the end we learn that all of this tsuris had nothing to do with Kai or Jiang Li or desalinization, and are shown a blownup photo of Lucas North. Dunh – dunh. Cue scenes from next week.

I’m SURE I’m reading too much into this, but if I am not reading too much into this, why does it seem so obvious to me? It must be my developing Spooks-generated paranoia, which got me last week with my doubts about the future loyalties of Dr. Kirby. The last minor player that Harry let escape was Azis Aybek, and he turned into a huge problem for the spooks. Letting Kai go back to the Chinese seems like a similar sort of recipe for disaster, like playing into their hands. Is he doing this to impress Ruth? To say that even in his middle management position, he still does have some autonomy? The identity of “They” and the role They play in Vaughn’s life are looking to be the equivalent this year of Sugarhorse and its vague, undefined desire to establish a “New World Order” — but one’s tempted to think after this episode that They are the Chinese. I’m wondering, given that Kai got to go back to the Chinese — which Beth reads as a sort of death wish step, about which I am not convinced, since the Chinese were trying to get him out of the country already anyway —  and considering the last few seconds, in which the CSS hit squad reveals that they were there for something relating to Lucas, is whether Vaughn’s attempt to “save himself” is going to involve setting out to ruin Lucas’s life once more.

Oh, let’s admit: I’m just angry at Lucas — or what this script is doing to the character just now. Pactum non servatur! I found last week’s developments plausible, but I was pushed this week. If we’re going to make Lucas a traitor for love, scriptwriters, at least don’t let’s have Mr. Eidetic Memory forgetting all his spycraft for a woman again. I really was shouting at the screen both times Lucas accessed the MI-5 security system in order to get at the Albany file. If, as Lucas says in the end, “a traitor’s a traitor,” then Lucas is now clearly a traitor, even if he wasn’t one before. He’s now a mercenary; as Vaughn remarks, he’s done this “for himself.” This development cut me to the quick, even though I figured after last week that it was inevitable. Traitor, ok. But idiot is troubling.

If I were Guy of Gisborne, I’d be making my early season 1 disgruntled sniff about now.

Mr. Armitage’s performance:

As my remarks below make clear, for me the big issue for Armitage’s performance in 9.4 is the facility with which he is able to negotiate the transitions between the personae of Lucas and John. Though these comments circle around various more specific moments and issues that is the big underlying question.

Given, or despite, the script problems, I continue to be pleased with the developing range of expressions that we are getting from Mr. Armitage when he’s inhabiting the John persona. In line with that, I wonder if there’s going to be a point where viewers start to think that he’s opened up John’s expressional and gestural range too far. That question underlies my analysis of the only moment where I developed reservations in this episode, but these are not too severe, and I think it’s worth some discussion. Also, because I’ve now neglected to mention it twice, I want to refer to my perception that the score in the Maya / John scenes is probably the best I’ve ever heard on Spooks. That’s not saying much because I usually hate the Spooks score (I particularly hated it in series 7, with all the Russianesque undertones), but I like it here. If I can find a way to write about it that’s not too technical and nonetheless comprehensible, eventually I will.

Lucas / John (Richard Armitage) watches Maya (Laila Rouass) sleep in his bed at the beginning of Spooks 9.4.

Love the beginning, not least because it feels like a gender reversal — stereotypically, it’s women who have the peace to watch their lovers sleep; waking men are all action and fury. Reference RAFrenzy‘s questions about Lucas’s gender trouble, though I have reservations, and of course de gustibus non est disputandam. Depends to some extent on whether Lucas’s masculinity is the sort you prefer, I suppose. In any case he’s certainly not over the boundary to victimhood in this scene. If Skully is right about the reasons for Mr. Armitage’s peculiar appeal, this is the kind of moment she’s talking about. It’s a nice compromise between a peaceful watching her sleep and the wakefulness that the men of my acquaintance have tended to demonstrate once they were ready to start their days.

As noted above, the scene sacrifices clarify to shadow, and thus specific perception to general feeling. It does offer us some nice profile shots of Mr. Armitage, of course. I think it’s an interesting editing move to show John’s reactions to Maya at the beginning of the scene primarily only in darkened profile.

Maya should be looking at him very closely, as he’s clearly avoiding her glance when he states he’s a “private security consultant.” Of course she has no way to know he’s a practiced liar, because he agreed the night before to be honest with her.

The next statement, too, feels like a ruse, or like he’s not listening. He says, “well, it’s not as exciting as you think.”

Well, in fact, she didn’t say she thought it was exciting, but said it was “mysterious,” and secondly, I don’t buy this from Lucas, who’s clearly reemerging in this scene to get back to his work at MI-5. This has to be a part of his cover that he’d share with anyone — security consultant, very boring. In fact, Lucas must find the work alluring, otherwise it’s hard to believe he’d still be at it after everything that’s happened since 7.1. He’s looking at her here, but this is not either John’s or Lucas’s “sincere” face.

He then deflects the conversation to Maya’s alleged tapas bar plans (see remark above on her slight withdrawal — maybe she is also saying “I am not the person you think I am.” It bugs me that we don’t know if they’ve just been doing the nasty the whole time since we last saw them, or whether they had actual conversations with content in them). And as she reminds him that it was a long time ago, we see him in shadowy profile again:

We see a quick eye blink here that must be an editing choice, but it’s nice — as if he has to react to her reminder that the past is a foreign country. Nice here as well, which was probably Armitage’s contribution, the bowed head that acknowledges the burden of the past on both of them.

I found the next part of the scene particularly effective because we see the transition between John and Lucas that’s been implied in the first part of the scene portrayed explicitly, and we see that it is as jarring for John / Lucas as it is for us. Lucas moves down the stairs, picks up the mail, and hears something suspicious. (Would a spy really have a patio door that’s so easy to jimmy open?) Instantly, he’s completely alert, and we’ve got Lucas’s action stance, including the arm position that suggests he’s ready to spring, as he moves out to the patio and looks around briefly, only to establish that no one’s there.  Then he’s back in the room, noticing the photo that’s been left for him by Vaughn, and there’s a split second micro-expression of dread — a quick swallow, brief raising of the eyelids and a queasy look — before he hears another noise.

The fears of John, the reaction times of Lucas. Lucas North (Richard Armitage) looks at a threatening photo left for him on his kitchen counter in Spooks 9.4.

He doesn’t know what the noise is, and so he has to be back to Lucas. Three steps: pause to think, swivel around to grab enough, move to shelter himself next to the wall, and this really alert expression appears:

One more step, then, to appear around the corner:

But it’s Maya, and so he’s got to put John’s face back on. It’s slow enough that it’s noticeable on screen, as if he’s struggling to recapture the earlier mood, the earlier persona.

He does get there, but the move is visible, and he’s not able to sustain the smile when she asks him what they are doing and he replies that they are doing what they were always supposed to do.

As I mentioned above, I love the knife shot that ends this scene.

On the ongoing theme of Lucas as mentor, I’m still enjoying Armitage here, mostly because he seems so supportive of his colleagues. This may again signal what Frenz sees as gender portrayal issues, but this is the kind of man I like to work with, frankly.

“You trust your instincts,” Lucas (Richard Armitage) tells Beth in Spooks 9.4. “They’ve got you this far.”

I’m a bit disturbed that the gentleness of Lucas’s mentoring is starting to make me think that I might end up liking Beth just because he appears to. I hope he’s watching his back. I am still SO suspicious of every word that comes out of her mouth, but I understand that second-, third-, and fourth-guessing of her decisions because I’ve done that sort of thing myself. We see similar consideration on Lucas’s part toward Dmitri.

I think the script sets up two problems for Mr. Armitage in this episode. For me he responds to one of these convincingly within the realm of his capacity to control for problems, the other in ways that I am still thinking about.

Problem one: is Lucas stupid, or arrogant, or just naive? I feel that Armitage once again got a script here that made Lucas do things that weren’t entirely believable from the standpoint of who I understand him to be, or else suggest that, as in series 8, he’s so vulnerable to an unstable influence that he’s not thinking clearly.

This problem begins in the scene where Lucas opts out of the attempt to turn Kai because Vaughn calls, and then lies about it. We could say that he’s so worried about what Vaughn could do to him that he responds immediately for that reason, but Lucas left his last encounter with Vaughn with the upper hand. Maybe the balance of power’s been upset by Vaughn’s break in to Lucas’s house, but is anything likely to happen that quickly? This error sets up Ruth to know that he wasn’t where he said he was during the beginning of the polygraph. Necessary for the plot, maybe, but not the kind of thing I really accept Lucas would do. Then the agreement to obtain the desired file, again presumably on the basis that Lucas fears revelation of John’s past to Maya. But I don’t buy this entirely — Lucas / John could lose Maya, but we still haven’t seen why she could be important enough to him to risk everything, and the script has already established that betrayal to Harry was not going to move Lucas. So, once Vaughn uses his only weapon, he’s got nothing left with which to move John. So why can’t Lucas wait, think, move more cautiously?

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) shoots at the CSS people from the CIA’s not-very-safe safe house in Spooks 9.4.

In fact, we could say that a general lack of caution pervades Lucas’s decisionmaking throughout this episode. He’s the one who’s always jumping to conclusions — for instance, he’s the one who starts pushing Beth to motivate Kai and it should be his responsibility for helping her to think more critically about the asset, one supposes; and it’s his failure to think through the CIA’s story that drops Jiang Li into the hands of the CSS. He makes error after error in reasoning his way through this case. Now, of course, he’s not the only one, but he’s the section chief.

What I like about Armitage’s performance in the bounds of a script that I feel makes Lucas look dumber than could ever possibly be is that his gestures in the scenes as the piece goes on seem to be establishing a sort of arc of hardening recklessness. We can see this in the contrast between the two scenes with the computer. When Lucas first goes to access the Albany file, we see many of Lucas’s typical nervousness signals:

But when he goes to actually accomplish the data theft, all of the nervous is gone and Lucas is hard. One imagines this is because he almost have to have gone in the hopes of making himself attempt the theft again, then runs into Owen and realizes he can push it off onto someone else, and suddenly it becomes an operation and no longer a self-compromise. In the frames that follow, we see only one hand to face move, and it’s brief and contemplative, rather than sad or distressed. Lucas’s expressions throughout are concentrated, alert, engaged.

And when he does turn to the last step: framing Owen, Lucas’s eyes divert from these concentrated postures for just one brief moment of contemplation — and they look dead, not sorry.

He really looks mean, above: Lucas has become the kind of person who can target a fall guy.

One wonders what role Harry’s statement in the scene where Section D figures out that they’ve been had plays a role in this process of hardening. The camera catches, just for a second, Lucas’s expression of humiliation as Harry notes that they’ve been played with contempt:

The episode does have a trajectory in which the elder screw it to the younger, and as Lucas accepts Ruth’s statement that Owen is 22 and will do time for Lucas’s crime, one can imagine Lucas thinking that he himself was harmed when he was 22 and this is the way of the world. The timeline would be about right.

The only problem, here, is that the script then wants to convince us again that this was a painful step, even as the previous scene establishes that Lucas accomplishes his task with cold-blooded efficiency and indeed arbitrariness. Owen was just the person who happened to be standing there that day, not the object of any particular vendetta, and yet Lucas saw his personnel record and knew at least something about him. The next scene with Vaughn would not work to accomplish what it does unless Lucas retrieved not only his persona as John, but the John who was harmed by Vaughn in the past. It’s immediately obvious from the first long shot on his face that it’s John who’s entered the bar:

We’ve never ever seen Lucas look like this — even in the scenes where he’s playing the double agent in 7.2 and has to convince Elizaveta of his pain at betraying MI-5. The subsequent moments are equally pained, as Vaughn asks rhetorically whether John involved a fall guy. But it’s like in drinking the vodka, which was also Lucas’s drink of choice, Armitage moves his body all the way back to Lucas. He makes it seem like his choice, now, to be the tough man playing poker with the big boys.

“I did what you asked,” Lucas / John tells Vaughn, and downs his vodka, in Spooks 9.4. “Now you and I are done.”

The next line is really important: “You didn’t do this for me,” Vaughn replies. “You did this — for you.” What’s great about the expressions on Armitage’s face at this point:

is the combination of surprise, wariness, and the move at the very end towards something that looks like anger or sadness on the right side of his face (for a change) and the slight, almost involuntary opening of the lips. What we see in this scene, something that John doesn’t realize, is that just as Vaughn did whatever caused John to become Lucas in the past, he has triggered exactly this step again. We see whoever it is here at the end of the scene realize the extent to which his activities in the world have compromised the pure thing he was trying to recapture — but only for a split second, as he’s already made his way back into Lucas. Armitage transmits facially the process that Vaughn is accomplishing (im)morally.

Really sophisticated, Mr. Armitage — a great way to deal with a problem script and still have a halfway believable character development. Hats off.

Problem two: the emotional range that Armitage has established for John. Over the past three weeks I’ve been tracing ways in which Armitage has expanded on Lucas’s expressions and gestures in order to build a repertoire of these for John. It seems to me on some level that we’re approaching the discursive limits of these repertoires, and I’m interested to hear what you think. (By “approaching the discursive limits,” we poststructuralists mean that the vehicles established for the conveyance of particular content are starting to strain under their rhetorical load, i.e., that whatever it is that needs to spoken in a given setting is exploding the capacity of the available expressive means to speak about it.) I think these limits are reached twice in this episode. Once I found it convincing, and once I was uncertain.

The convincing moment is the scene where John runs to Maya in the hospital to proclaim to her that they can be together now and “do anything.”

Really, even given the broader expressive capabilities that Armitage has built into John, this scene is off the map. You have John yelling at the beginning, you have him emotionally out of breath, falling back into the waiting area chair, responding perhaps in disbelief at what he believes he has just wrought, you have his excitement at informing Maya that their future now stands wide open, you have the “earnest forehead crinkles” that aren’t really a part of Lucas’s repertoire — Lucas prefers the “crinkles of pain” or the “crinkles of irony.” In fact, we’ve never ever seen Lucas do anything like this; at this point John has completely separated from Lucas’s gestures and expressions to become a different person.

I have to say, though, that I found this believable, and an exciting scene to watch, and I think it’s for two reasons. The first is that Armitage is completely John in this scene; there’s no hint of Lucas here at all. He enters the scene and ends it as John. The second is that the ending of the scene is not only poignant, it recalls the end of 9.2, where it seems that the purpose of all of this recovery of his past is not desire so much as it is remembrance, a remembrance of his past that’s established through contact with Maya. John’s eyes are closed as if he’s summoning the recollection of a former self, and the way that he presses his face into Maya’s at the end of the scene seems to suggest that he’s trying to breath her in entirely and engulf her in his senses as much as he is simply kissing her. Armitage thus moves John back to the emotional core that he’s established in 9.2, and the scene remains very credible and indeed moving.

The moment I was uncertain of was the (somewhat earlier) scene in the park, where Lucas / John now has to make a decision about how he’s going to respond to Vaughn’s demands.

Here Vaughn is asking Lucas again for the Albany file, and promising to disappear once he gets it.

In this clip, for the solid first half of the scene we’re still seeing Lucas as he listens to Vaughn’s demands. This could be Lucas of 7.2 talking to Arkady Kachimov, in terms of facial expressions, until the call ends, and it looks like Lucas is going to stride off resolutely through the park, except he’s suddenly lamed, and we see a whole-body expression, a convulsion of dismay or anger, before a quick cut to Lucas sitting on the park bench and holding his head in his hands. This is frankly something that we only rarely see from Lucas, to my knowledge. I mean here intense emotive convulsions in a situation where no one else is physically present for Armitage to play against. I could think of only two, off hand, which you can look at to compare: the scene in 7.2 when Lucas can’t sleep, and the scene in 8.4 when Oleg Darshavin informs Lucas that he’s holding Sarah Caulfield hostage. Interestingly, just like the one above, both of these scenes also involve frame-speed tricks that both simultaneously draw our attention to the convulsive moment and abbreviate it so that it falls slightly outside our perceptive frame. But in the scene from 9.4 everything about the emotion and physical motion is much more extreme. Convincing?

While I don’t think this is awful, I was jarred by this scene, I think because the transition from Lucas to John is immediate — there’s just no pause between the Lucas persona on the phone and whoever it is (John?) who performs that initial reaction. It’s John, one imagines, who’s on the park bench at the end. This was a bit too abrupt for me, too quick and far of a motion outside of Lucas for me to accept easily. What do you guys think?

And as a final question about the characterization of John and Lucas: Who do you think we’ll encounter first next week?

Clothing Armitage:

Although this isn’t the first time we’ve seen it, I’ll come clean and declare that I just don’t like the wifebeater as a style choice for Lucas. I never have. I realize this is likely to be a minority opinion.

Our friend the season 9 Belstaff jacket, still making him look great. Something that I noticed this time in looking at it that I hadn’t before is the contrast between the oversized features (collar, cuffs) and the tightly fitted moments in the jacket. It creates the potential for an impression of toughness and vulnerability at the same time that we didn’t see in series 8’s jacket. The collar creates a sort of looseness and a largeness that can accentuate his occasional looks of desperation.

Similarly, here, the unsnapped wrists make him look like a boy whose nacket is just a touch too big, even as he barks his responses to Vaughn into his phone.

As miserable as Lucas looks here, I still loved these jeans, with the slight relaxation in the cut of the bottom of the leg really making the leg look like a long, tapering pillar. I’m sure he’s not upset because of the way the jeans look.

Random:

Armitage is still delivering some impressive action moves, to wit:

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) heads back down from the roof of the Chinese Embassy in Spooks 9.4.

And, to conclude, best quip I’ve heard in a long time:

At a CIA – MI-5 meeting along the Thames embankment in Spooks 9.4. Harry (Peter Firth): “[I] see you’re plunging into the indigenous cuisine.” Beecher (Colin Salmon): “It’s the vinegar. [Snort.] Who knew?”

Oh, Mr. Beecher. I will subscribe to that — both to the vinegar on salty “chips” and the surprise about how great it tastes. I discovered it in London, too. Rule Britannia.

~ by Servetus on October 12, 2010.