What IS Harry’s favorite opera? [Spooks 9.1-9.6 spoilers!]

Same disclaimers as before. My caps. Also, just a gentle reminder that Servetus does not read spoilers, has not read the BBC synopses of the two remaining episodes, and does not watch “scenes from next week.” Please indulge me in this folly; it’s only two more weeks. Really, only one more week, since there’ll be no scenes from next week at the end of episode 8. Sob! I missed you for so long, Lucas North, and now you’re about to disappear again. This time, it seems, for good. Mr. Armitage, I hope your parents really enjoyed this episode because it seems likely that you and Spooks are over.

Of course, they (with reason) and I (with none at all) will still be proud of you. Yes, there’s that good news in the back of my mind still! As chuffed (cough) as I am about The Hobbit, though, I know that there’s no way that Mr. Armitage can do that and Spooks and Strike Back and The Rover in 2011 unless he’s even more of a workaholic than we realized, i.e., if he’s able to continue to work without ever sleeping and for some reason all of Spooks 10 is scripted at night and filmed in Africa or New Zealand. I assume that The Rover is now off the table and that Spooks is what’s gonna give, as the Sky announcements about Strike Back make it seem that he might be contractually obligated. I have to say if I knew he could do either Spooks or Strike Back and there were a fan poll to ask which, I am not sure what I’d pick at this point. That’s an improvement over the last two weeks, when I’d have voted for Strike Back.

I was prepared to dislike this episode intensely after the plot layout scenes at the beginning, but I ended it not only with tears in the corner of my eye, but one or two on my cheeks. Admittedly this was an otherwise emotional day for me, but as the plot lines about Lucas start to weave together, my eyes were tearing up for Lucas / John — both in sadness for the person who he appears to have become here, and in regret for the person who I thought he was, who he could have been. At least they seem now to be moving toward attempting to make him a tragic traitor and not an idiotic one, although this script puts us in a bind — if we’re happy that he’s a fool for love, we have to accept that he’s a fool and has been played from the very beginning and not realized it until it was much too late to do anything. In order to get a redeemed John we have to accept a stupid Lucas. This episode makes that tradeoff, which was foreshadowed earlier, now seem unavoidable. After 9.4 and the most implausible script I’ve yet seen on Spooks, I’d have said that I’d have cried no tears after this third permutation of Lucas North met his demise — he was too inconsistently written to be entirely believable, and the problems in plot were creating points at which I was questioning Mr. Armitage’s characterization and acting choices. But now, just because I’m so affected by the problem of John’s sentiments (love, desire, obsession?) for Maya, I’m once again in doubt. Maybe the script will pull the chestnuts out of the fire for me. Though I still hope that they kill Lucas in series 9 so I don’t have to spend an entire year wondering how he will die at the beginning of series 10.

***

The episode:

(Come on, kudos, you should be able to do better than this. Two typos in one graphic, three if you count the odd spelling of Danielle, which diverges from the BBC credits page? I spell it throughout with the conventional orthography.)

Plot recycling: This, I do not like. A British-programmed drone ends up hitting a U.S. base in “Helman” province and British and U.S. spooks have to haggle over how to deal with it? Sounds an awful lot like episode five of another show I watched earlier this year in which a British-programmed drone called in for air support to a U.S. troop position ends up firing on the U.S. position in Helmand province. Interesting that two provinces in Afghanistan should have such similar names. Oh, and once again we end up playing a long game of quis habet corpus with a smart-ass computer programmer who’s used primarily to ask questions that aid in the characterization of our hero and then conveniently but tragically gets shot to death just before the resolution of the plot. For good measure, there’s also a shootout where our hero ends up protecting a wounded woman behind a car and then running out of ammo. All these similarities could get really confusing, especially since Colin Salmon appears in that other show (though not in the relevant episode) and here seems to have switched allegiances from MI-6 to the CIA. I was just waiting for them to work Ewen Bremner in here, too, as the computer expert, though his appearances always worry me because I don’t understand most of what he says. Now, I like Salmon a lot (and he’s got a reasonably credible U.S. accent; I only noticed one really obtrusive dialect slip-up in this episode that drew his Americanness into question — for future reference, Mr. Salmon, Americans say “appreshiate,” not “appresiate”), and I am growing to have more and more respect for the British practice of using great actors even in minor roles, but come on. There were eight million human stories in the naked city, but apparently only two plots for all of Afghanistan?

Tariq (Shazad Latif) tells Ruth that the Grid’s been compromised in Spooks 9.6: “This is crazy advanced, almost invisible.” Totally the kind of language this sort of computer expert would be using. I wonder how Mr. Latif feels about his role on this show. This is an actor and character that could be used much more effectively and given more screen time. He’s also cute: Such beautiful eyes, such expressive lips.

That’s then followed up with Tariq’s accidental discovery that the Grid is bugged in such a thoroughgoing manner that nothing is safe any more: “they’ve got everything!” (This feels like series 8’s description of Nightingale: “a plan to change the world order as we know it.”) Then Ruth’s approach to Harry is so obvious –why would she interrupt a discussion about the cybershell project over some random relationship trash? — that you’d think the people watching them would realize what a huge signal that was or at least be suspicious. On top of the stuff I already didn’t like from 9.4 that headlined the episode, i.e., Lucas being willing to compromise an operation in order to pursue his quest to resurrect John’s past (more about this below, under Armitage’s performance), this was shaping up to be a disaster. I actually considered turning it off and going home to have a nap. OK, but Lucas does give in and go to see John at Battersea Park, and so finally the script gives us a few crumbs about Lucas / John, and this turned out to be a moving scene for me, at least — moving enough to keep me watching. And writing. For several hours.

We’re now about about twelve minutes in, and assuming we accept the major premise (the cyberattackers are going to be able to give themselves access to all of the intelligence data of the West! oh noes!!!) the plot starts to become more interesting. Lucas and Danielle have a few interesting exchanges, the spooks figure out a way to fake out the attackers enough to figure out who they are, and best of all, we get to see Malcolm again!

“Lucas!” Malcolm Wynn-Jones (Hugh Simon) exclaims in Spooks 9.6.

I love that I’m not sure whether Malcolm’s use of the name “John” to refer to Lucas was a dodge for his mother or a slip on his part. I wondered how Lucas knew about anything Harry was doing in 1979, when he would have been a child. I liked the device of Section D being able to hear the telephone calls between the cyberattackers masquerading as Harry as a means of advancing plot. And I loved the hoist on their own petard quality of the plot resolution, with the cyberattackers being tricked through a voice simulation to stay in position long enough that they could be captured. Though it’s not clear why these criminals seem to have re-inaugurated the Sino-Soviet pact. Finally we are put on notice that Ruth is on to Lucas, and then a stunning final scene, in which Lucas discovers that Malcolm’s home has been completely vacated. Did Malcolm call Ruth? Was something prearranged between Harry and Malcolm to happen if Lucas ever showed up to pick up the Albany package? Something’s up that Lucas, and therefore we, don’t understand.

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) discovers that Malcolm’s house has been emptied, in Spooks 9.6.

Still no clue as to what the Chinese could want with Lucas, whom they appeared to have targeted in the concluding scene of 9.4. Whatever happens in the last two episodes, if it manages to tie all the dangling strands together, it should at least have the merit of being interesting. Of course, I’ve been disastrously overoptimistic about the series 9 script before.

Mr. Armitage’s performance:

Though it was not as clearly foregrounded as in some other episodes of this series, we saw plenty of Action Armitage this week. He’s especially good at slinging Fiona Glascott’s body around, it seems:

But of course the real matter up for discussion, and the ongoing issue left over from last week, is how well Armitage is handling the Lucas / John transitions and how credible his reactions are given the plot conundrums of the script, which he seems to be expected to bear on his own back. To recap that, I concluded that given the confusion that audience is to be kept in regarding the Lucas / John / Maya plot, when Vaughn manifests himself as Maya’s boyfriend, Michael, no matter what Armitage could not show much surprise — even though this hardly seemed credible from a common sense perspective. I also said that we didn’t see any of Lucas’s obvious distress signs in that scene, either. We still have to manage this problem in our analysis of Armitage’s performance, but there’s another issue, or rather an opposite issue, that creeps in as well. If it seemed before that there were clear divergences between Lucas and John, this week, we see the personalities converging again. This second issue ends up being what holds Armitage’s performance together, I think, and I didn’t spy it until the second careful watch-through. The episode can be read as what happens when someone’s holding two separate identities apart in his head is forced by events to confront that the identities are closer than he realizes.

But back to the beginning and the problem of how 9.5 ends. 9.6 opens with that apparently missing distress signal — Lucas or John having concluded, perhaps on the basis of his evaluative glance toward her at the end of 9.5, that Maya has no idea what’s going on. I hope that’s not fatal. We get this as his reaction to the revelation:

And now all of the expressional information missing earlier is there: the look of misery at 0:04, the very slightly pulled in lower lip, and in particular, the very slight, almost unnoticeable microexpressions at 0:06 coming somewhat unusually from the right corner of his mouth. Lucas is the legend, we should think; John is the real person. Even so, expressionally, this could all still be Lucas, down to the vigorous swallow at 0:07-0:08 and again at 0:13, along with the slightly lowered head. At around 0:16 we have Lucas accepting the phone call, and the first few times I looked at this clip I thought that in a way, Vaughn turns Lucas into John when he says his name, but that’s not quite right. At 0:17, despite the resigned tone of the statement, we still have the character trying to take control of the conversation — the surrender of the Lucas identity comes after 0:24, when Lucas tries to assert that he is on an operation and thus can’t function as John at the moment. The question then is how we read 0:32 to the end of the scene — this is way too emo for Lucas, so we have to conclude that it is John. It’s sort of the same question I was asking week before last about 0:16 and following here:

Week before last, this was on the cusp of too much for me, and when I saw this repeated, before I saw the end of the episode, I was ready to note that I was still feeling that way. In the context of understanding this gesture as rage, I get that given the control that Armitage has given Lucas, almost any sudden movement he makes in anger is going to look like a temper tantrum, but this kind of convulsion is certainly out of character for Lucas and seems to strain the boundaries of John — as I have said before. I suppose it would be fair to ask of me why I’m willing to accept an emo John when it comes to love, but not when it comes to anger. But that conclusion is reading from the beginning of the episode without having seen the end.

“You can’t blackmail someone whose life has no real value,” Vaughn (Iain Glenn) explains to Lucas North (Richard Armitage) in Spooks 9.6. “You have to have something to lose, and so I gave you something.”

In terms of the characterization that he’s been giving us for John and Lucas all along, I felt like Mr. Armitage was on firmer ground when we moved to that scene in Battersea Park, the script of which I liked so well. We find out, for instance, that John’s father had had a few strokes, and that Vaughn had sought to influence him by feigning same. This, and Vaughn’s statement that when they got drunk together, John would “bang on about Maya for hours and hours,” underlines the perception we’re getting of John as a potentially much more emotional, more sincere individual than Lucas.

When John asks why Vaughn is acting this way, the only emotive point in his query is when he speaks about Maya:

“Why are you doing this to her?” Lucas (Richard Armitage) asks Vaughn (Iaian Glenn), in Spooks 9.6. Note raised eyebrows, crinkled forehead, slightly dropped jaw.

The gleeful way in which Vaughn delivers a series of crushing assertions here allows us to see a continuity between the expressional repertoires for John and Lucas that I ultimately found much more convincing than emo John, and thus much more moving. When John threatens to shoot Vaughn (something he should have done all along, and one still wonders why he doesn’t do it here, since it’s unclear why eliminating Vaughn would put his relationship with Maya at risk), Vaughn cautions, “Steady, John. You think about this. You have a name, a life, that were never meant to be yours. You have no friends, no family, no past. You’re not a real person. Now I’ve given you something. I’ve given you her.” All the way through this litany of Lucas’s aporias, we can see with complete clarity on Armitage’s face just how devastating this must be for John, but with a near minimum of expression:

This clear devastation expressed without a lot of motion in Armitage’s features makes it possible for Vaughn to deliver his most devastating line to clear effect — that Lucas is not a real person — without us ever having to see Vaughn’s face. It’s thus at the point where Vaughn negates John’s identity as Lucas that we see the greatest damage to his affect:

It’s the lowered eyes, cheeks, even slightly lowered head of humiliation, along with the Adam’s apple that we barely see move under the surface of Armitage’s throat, that make this so moving for us.

And then there’s one more sort of horrified microexpression as Vaughn tells Lucas “I’ve given you her”:

that points simultaneously to what Lucas himself must be realizing at this point — that his effort to reclaim his identity as John has been so fully capacitated and manipulated by Vaughn that it must lead to the near destruction of Lucas. There’s a sadness and a fright here that speaks clearly even though the face is not moving much. We get a lot more out of this version of emo, I would argue, than out of the earlier, emotive anger, although that emotion could have been brought to the fore here as well without a lot of difficulty. We don’t realize at this point, though, how important this realization is going to be to later events in the episode — assuming we start reading the John vs Lucas problem as a question of the integration of personality.

That fright then comes out clearly at the end of the scene, as Vaughn tells John to stop kidding himself that he has a choice in whether to cooperate — that thinking one has volition just makes it all worse. (Something that I incidentally consider an important life insight.)

Moving on to the next series of Armitage’s performances, we’re dealing with Lucas’s interactions with Danielle Ortiz, the American computer expert. I thought she was scripted quite nicely, and I thought that Armitage accomplished Lucas’s weird nervousness, feigned to convince her of the necessity of diverting from the planned route, effectively, even though I had to remind myself that he had to be feigning it and hence was not overacting.

Honestly, I think part of the problem for me in watching several of these episodes is some sort of cognitive trap. First, Armitage establishes this really controlled expressional and gestural repertoire for Lucas. Then, as Lucas, he has to “act” to motivate others to cooperate. So I notice Lucas “acting” in ways to convince others in order to achieve his ends, but then I think, “given that he’s a spy, wouldn’t even Lucas’s acting seem a little less like acting?” And then I think, “but if I didn’t notice him ‘acting,’ how would I realize that he’s lying?” The whole thing –particularly my stance between observer from off screen, and thinking about the scenes from the perspective of the characters on screen — is quite complex, and I wonder how Mr. Armitage deals with putting all of this together. (This question becomes pretty severe for me in the scene with Malcolm; see below.)

Now, it’s clear that the whole point of the Danielle character –as much as I liked her; it seems like Fiona Glascott manages the sort of brash American chick mood that Genevieve O’Reilly occasionally attempted to put on for Sarah Caulfield with a lot more flair– is that putting her in the car with Lucas lets us find out information about him. We’re supposed to see stuff in Lucas because Danielle is needling him. So what is the script reminding us of here? That Lucas sees his prison term in Russia as service to his nation, for instance; that Lucas approves of second chances (with that niggling reminder from Danielle that you only get one!); that of course he’s killed while at work, what a silly question, though it’s pretentiously, annoyingly foreshadowing here; and that none of her rather facetious flirting has any effect on him at all, until she hits the topic of music.

I liked how this was scripted, how Lucas concedes that he “used to” like music. “How does a person go off music? Seriously!” Danielle asks in a rather obnoxious tone, and you can tell that the question is bugging Lucas. His answer is finally, “sometimes you just stop hearing it.” If any of emo John were here, this would have ended up overplayed, but instead, we see the characteristic Armitage chin jerk:

and then the “shaking off bad thought or emotion” face move:

and both of these only from the side.

We know he’s a little rattled in a way he wasn’t by her statements about having to go mountain-climbing with “big spunky guys” like him, but all we really see of that is a slightly more frequent eye blink rate and a glance back across his shoulder.

This is a really strong scene that tells us a lot about the poverty of Lucas’s life without pushing it in our faces. One imagines that it was John who listened to music, never Lucas. See it all in sequence here, and notice how quickly he performs the look over his shoulder:

The next sequence of Armitage’s performance relates to Lucas’s visit to Malcolm to pick up the Albany file. I have to say I thought that this series of interspersed cuts showed Mr. Armitage doing his best work in the episode, and I think it’s for two reasons. The first is because of the cognitive trap I sketched out above. That is, we know he is lying through his teeth all the way through the scene, but a lot of conflicting stuff comes through in addition to those telltale microexpressions. For instance, the scene starts with Lucas seeing Malcolm for the first time in a while, and he gets out a smile that for a split second belongs to the “genuine” side of Lucas’s expressional repertoire, starting from the left side of his face and extending all across it:

But then clearly problematic gestures: first hand to face:

and just as he’s talking about “doctored evidence,” the clear Spooks “I am telling you a narrative” gesture in the same way that it shows up in the conference room:

it’s a “truth” gesture being employed here for its rhetorical effect. Once we as audience grasp this, we start looking understanding the fundamental mood of unease under Lucas’s postures, expressions, and gestures in this scene.

“[Harry’s] as well as can be expected, but he needs our help, [half-beat], Malcolm [tone slightly rising].” The hard sell.

The second reason this is such a great scene is that we see Lucas / John putting into practice what’s been realized at Battersea Park — that the fact of Lucas’s non-reality and John’s suppression under Lucas means that the two have much more in common than either has thought up until now. Hence, the signal sent as Lucas watches Malcolm unearth the desired file is intriguing because first we think, “oh, here’s Lucas, with his typical ruthless, calculating expression.” And yet all the action in this scene is motivated by John and his desire to get and keep Maya.

So what we see, through all the lying, is that John and Lucas, despite their varying emotional repertoires, are really much more connected in terms of their ultimate ethos that we might originally have thought. The emotional John who’ll do anything to protect Maya needs the ruthless, cool Lucas who can manipulate his contacts to get him what he needs. (Metapoint: this is a nice rhetorical and emotional point for the script to be making, but the point makes completely implausible yet again the way that the script makes Lucas look so stupid as he’s succumbing to blackmail. If John and Lucas really are the same person, John needs to be smarter and Lucas more emotional. We see the latter, or hints of it, in Armitage’s performance, but the script up to and including this episode kills the potential for the former). And we know, if we’re thinking, that John must also have had some important ruthless qualities, if he’s done something so terrible that Maya can’t be allowed to know about it.

The newly open ruthless potential of John reaches full fruition when Malcolm says, in response to his confused mother, “it’s just a friend of mine, John,” and we see Lucas reaching into the right-hand pocket of his jacket, where he had stored the pistol and silencer he had prepared to kill or threaten Vaughn.

“Old habits die hard,” Lucas surmises about Malcolm’s use of cover name, and it’s perhaps that realization — that John, the person who was able to do something so stunningly bad that he had to abandon his identity to cover it up for over fifteen years, is still willing to consider killing Malcolm to keep his cover straight and thus much more ruthless than we might have imagined — that makes his parting smile so weak. Now we really read him as insincere, and as if to suggest that Malcolm realizes this, the camera lingers on Malcolm’s face for a long moment as Lucas lowers his head to ask, with an attempt at sincerity, that Malcolm not notify MI-5 of this little data transfer:

“Please?”

It’s interesting, in the immediate wake of this incident, that when Lucas asks Danielle why she ran away, she retorts immediately: “Because you’re lying to me.” There’s a certain paradox to that; we think that we understand best when those closest to us, rather than strangers, are lying — but in the world of the spooks, where everything is a lie, one also has to decide when to accept something problematic as truth — which is what Malcolm at this point appears to be doing. Danielle, in contrast, can look at the obvious indices and read them easily. Her statement is also an index of the extent to which the attributes of John and Lucas have moved much closer to each other in the extremely complex scene with Malcolm.

Here the script gets a little ham-handed again. It’s a nice conceit that strangers make us look at ourselves differently, but this moment takes the notion a step oddly too far. It’s not helped by the odd intensity of Danielle here, which moves beyond her general pattern of weirdness. I actually think Armitage’s performance saves the scene from being too overwrought.

Danielle Ortiz (Fiona Glascott) asks Lucas: “So are you running toward something? Or away from it?”

Again, this is not about Danielle, but about Lucas — we’re supposed to conclude that the conflation of potentially virtuous John and ruthless Lucas is in a position to confuse him about his motivation for what he’s in the process of doing. Lucas is clearly a little surprised by her question and then statement, and unsure what to do with her — so we see hints of interesting reactions, for example, at 0:06 (twitching right corner of mouth), but nothing definitive, before he cuts off the scene and thus the reflection. He doesn’t really know exactly what he’s doing, anymore, I think, and thus the decision to end the conversation.

[As a side point, it’s interesting that from this point on in the episode until the final action sequence, often the only clues we have to Lucas’s reactions are what we see in the rear-view mirror of the car. Interesting editing choice.]

About to execute Danielle, Lucas (Richard Armitage) hesitates in Spooks 9.6.

The remainder of the script offers Armitage an interesting dilemma, I think. On the one hand, Lucas can’t or won’t kill Danielle in cold blood, telling Harry that he’ll taking decommissioning rather than do so; on the other, given Danielle’s knowledge of his detour to Malcolm’s house, her status is already uncertain, and when she reveals that she knows the name of the information he’s aggregated, Albany, her fate is sealed. Lucas won’t kill her to protect the computer security of the West, but he will let her die in order to hide his own, or John’s misdeeds, which is starting to mean the same thing. We see a palimpsest here on Armitage’s body of the old Lucas we remember from series 7, who worked tirelessly to protect the civilians in his path, people like Dean and his mother, on the face of series 9 Lucas, who is a traitor. (And now we wonder: was Lucas’s heroism in series 7 and parts of 8 an attempt to make up for his ruthlessness as John in the part of the story we don’t know about yet?)

Lucas’s refusal to kill at the outset of the scene thus ends up being much more a demonstration of his skill as a spy, or alternately, an attempt to prevent himself from being manipulated (either by Harry, or the unknown author of the voice on his cell phone) than an ultimate demonstration of his ethics. Given the extent to which he’s been manipulated so far, his anger in the next moments reads a great deal like the latter:

“Wrong answer,” says Lucas, when the voice on the phone can’t tell him what Harry’s favorite opera is, and casts away the cell phone, in Spooks 9.6.

“Hey, look at you, you didn’t lie,” Danielle (Fiona Glascott) gasps when Lucas doesn’t refute her surmise that her wound is bad.

In the end, after a moment where Lucas disables one of his attackers with almost unparalleled brutality for this character, he’s not able to move himself back to a pure ethical stance — neither the emotionality of John, nor the rationality of Lucas. Now, it seems that Danielle would have died anyway, as her wound was so severe. But just as Danielle praises Lucas for telling her the truth, he lies her into her death — hanging up his call to the emergency rescue services, pulling her arm away from keeping pressure on her wound, and telling her, to soothe her, that he can hear the ambulance coming. He tells her won’t let her die — and yet, he does.

But Armitage still can’t push Lucas (or John? since it’s John who needs her to die) to a place of real aggression. Once Danielle has gasped out the name, “Albany,” and in response he’s made his calculation:

He lets her die with a whimper rather than a bang. He takes her fingers away gently, he holds her patiently, he lets her slide away. We can read this as either emotionality or rationality, as either John or Lucas — but either way it’s cruel.

The dead Danielle is the price that John wanted to pay for Maya, and we see –perhaps with a little more than disappointment– that John can put on his anticipatory face for her as he approaches her house:

and we can see his eyes smiling in the rear view mirror — the first time they’ve done this all episode:

But this personage — John as we’ve known him in previous encounters with Maya, loving, hopeful — is doomed to erasure. Because now it’s clearly John — who has, via Danielle’s death, finally been fully invested with all of the ruthlessness of Lucas and none of Lucas’s ethics– who goes back to Malcolm’s house to obtain that file, at any cost:

Which brings me back to the question I raised at the beginning about the emotionality of John. I’d been reading those earlier segments — chunks of characterization that I didn’t especially like, and that I attributed at least in part to dilemmas set up by the script — as statements about emotionality, anger, and frustration. The next point at which we see that, however, is in the final scene of the episode:

When you watch that, and it has a few truly alarming seconds, you wonder if what you are seeing is the disintegration of a personality that can no longer accommodate all the elements associated with it. Lucas and John can’t really fit in the same body. If that’s what Armitage is trying to achieve here: it’s frighteningly real.

Clothing Armitage:

Not a lot to say here, but I wondered if the reason the Belstaff jacket didn’t appear was that Mr. Armitage still appears to have so much of John Porter’s upper body musculature, so that the narrow cut of the jacket would have been difficult to carry off, to wit:

And as usual, I like Lucas’s choice of shoes:

Random:

Blurry, but love how both of his feet leave the ground when he’s running:

And how far he can get his mouth open:

Favorite quip:

Danielle: “Hey, James Bond!” Lucas: “Not exactly. Lucas North, MI-5.” Khandy should love this!

Second favorite quip:

Danielle: “So what’s your big secret, James? Or should I tell your bosses about our pitstop here in Hobbit Country?”

Favorite camera angle:

Let’s hope some light opens up over Lucas soon. Quidquid latet, apparebit!

~ by Servetus on October 26, 2010.