RBOC: “I finally saw Spooks 10” edition

Finally got around to watching Spooks 10. Legenda has more or less replaced my old RBOC posts, but I felt like commenting on this issue and didn’t feel like writing paragraphs. Also, I have to return the DVDs to the library today so no time for serious pondering. If you haven’t seen the series, or have and have forgotten it, here’s a plot summary at wikipedia. With regard to Armitage, I felt at the end like I did at the end of series 9. I’m glad Richard Armitage was in Spooks; I think it offered him some interesting dramatic opportunities at the beginning of series 7 and occasionally after that; I’m sure it was good for his career; I hope he made some money doing it. Had the writing of series 8 and 9 had been as consistently good as it was in the very last episode of series 10, I would have been sorry to see him leave it. But nothing in series 10 — although I ended up enjoying it — made me wish he was still in it.

• Nothing I saw in episode 1 changed my original opinion that the last shot of John Bateman and the reference to his potential desire for forgiveness were tacky. Why put in a shot that’s almost comical? If you want us to see Bateman’s death as tragic?
• Similarly cheap: ten seconds of Tom Quinn at the end. Sorry. I didn’t buy it. Tom leaves MI-5 — indeed appears to suffer something like a nervous breakdown — because of his conscience, and now we should believe he’s a hired killer?
• For most of the first episode, I thought, I’m not going to make it through this series. Was the show always this boring? Or was I really so entranced by Richard Armitage that I could ignore the rest of this? (I’m being a bit facetious — in order to understand Richard Armitage better, I also watched the first six seasons.) One thing I noticed particularly this time was the replay of so many places I’ve seen already. You don’t mind repeated sets so much when the plots are more interesting.
• Though my ultimate evaluation of this series was somewhere between the drastically differing tones of reviews I read, you can see in the early episodes of this series why some reviewers thought it was tired. Elements like: “spy with a conscience” and “Ruth never fails” and “child in danger!” were repeated here without noticeable change or elaboration. The new grid characters for this series were also undeveloped and / or replays of characters we’ve met before. The “spying” elements of this series were both predictable and not really believable. Which is why it was almost funny that in the last twenty minutes of the show, it occurs to Ruth to ask why they are finding certain kinds of evidence. If they’d ever asked that question before, the show would have collapsed completely. It was one of those curiously postmodern script moments where you wonder if the characters are going to conduct a revolt against the script. In particular, the accuracy and speed with which they accessed and interfaced CC tv data was, well, actually not at all credible. By the end of this series, that computer and its motion analysis system had sort of turned into the equivalent of the transporter on Star Trek as a deus ex machina.
• It’s hard to avoid seeing, while watching series 10, exactly how much audience capital they burned during series 8 and 9 to make those very complicated plots work. (And it almost makes you think the writers thought that series 9 would be the last.) Because one problem with the beginning of series 10 is how few continuing characters there are left to like. I realized, with the occasional moments of intra-Grid relationship warmth, how much I’d missed that element of the show (the interactions of the spies among each other), which was almost totally abandoned in series 8 and 9, when characters were simply rapidly torched, and the remaining potential relationships (Ros + Lucas, Lucas + Jo) were non-starters. I guess that doesn’t matter so much here, since they knew series 10 would be the last — and there really was only one intra-Grid story left (Ruth + Harry).
• In essence I think that means we have to see the presence of Armitage in the show as an element that contributed to killing it — insofar as the writers got so involved in plot lines involving Lucas North that they failed to develop the other characters enough to make them narratively load-bearing entities. NB: I am not blaming this on Armitage, and the show was getting old, but Lucas did take up a disproportionate amount of plot energy.
• Lara Pulver is a talented actress, not just another pretty face. I wondered whether I was going to buy “serious career woman” from her after the campy Cruella DeVille number in Robin Hood, but I did. Her face has a lot more capacity for emotion that one would realize from watching series 3 of RH.Based on some of the reviews I’ve read I’m starting to wonder if her career has been impacted by how gorgeous she is — if casting agents are too distracted by her beauty? (Don’t know and am not interested in researching her career.)
• I liked Sophia Myles and I miss her, even though I agreed with 100% with the explanation given for decommissioning her (and said at the time that it was a reason not to hire her).
• Max Brown is better looking than I realized. Armitage really had him so badly out-beautifulled that I couldn’t see him well in series 9.
• About halfway through episode 2, I started getting interested. As you would probably predict if you knew me, it was the plot line about Martha Ford — who spies because she thinks it’s the right thing to do and then gets abandoned.
• Composers: cheap but obvious recycle of main theme from James Bond movies during car chase scenes = uncool.
• Although I never like to see a Section D character die, I was left largely cold by Tariq’s death, and I assume this is because the last few series gave me so little investment in this character. The statement he made about how an MI-5 career was something he had to fight for and so he cared when things went wrong was the most real information we got from him since his first appearance. Oh, that there had been more of this, earlier on.
• Which really raises the unavoidable conclusion for me that the real problem with both series 8 and 9 was that many of the things that made the early seasons of Spooks great were simply missing. There were almost no great philosophical script moments, attempts at equal plot distribution that would have built up smaller characters in preparation for subsequent seasons, or section D character relationships — series 8 and 9 were heavily about complicated plots with characters from outside the Grid, and in fact, in series 9, the complications of the plot were such that they submerged the great potential philosophical moments of the series (Lucas / John’s conversation with Harry during interrogation), because I couldn’t get past the credibility problem to think about the philosophical issues involved.
• William Hope (Jim Coaver) is a Canadian, and this makes him a lot more believable as an American. Only a few slip ups. I almost bought this. But I’m starting to wonder if Texas / Oklahoma is the new Brooklyn in terms of accents non-native actors think they can easily feign. It’s not so, folks. But Hope was pretty good. The most believable American was the very young Agent Defoe (Rick Kissack). It was a tiny role but his performance, in terms of its Americanness, youth, and arrogance, was spot on. Kissack has trained in the U.S. and you can tell, I think. He has the vibe of the conservative, cocky, mid-twenty-year-old, new government agent uncannily down to a T.
• Alice Krige’s performance was strong (I’ve always liked her work), but none of the Gavriks were remotely credible as Russians. So I guess you can say a Russian viewer of this series has an even greater believability hurdle to get over than an American.
• While watching episode 3, I wondered: are British audiences still buying into this “Muslim evil among us?” storyline? Or its counterpart, the “one good Muslim” plot? Yawn, although I felt sorry for Ashur.
• The really strong performances in this series came from Peter Firth (good — there were a few points where I almost identified with him, though I have always had very little sympathy for his character) and Nicola Walker (fantastic). Ruth is potentially the character in Spooks that I identify with most. I was torn into pieces when I heard about her death. I’ve always loved the way Walker has Ruth Evershed play with Ruth’s tics in social and spying situations (“antisocial dowdiness”) and here it’s masterful. I loved how she played the Home Secretary (newly slim Simon Russell Beale) for everything she was worth. I hated how she died. Hated, hated, hated it. Which I guess is the sign of a good script.
• Did anyone believe that the UK government was going to allow Harry’s extradition that easily?
• When Spooks is good (which has been relatively rare since series 7, although I felt strongly at the time and continue to do so, that 9.3 was a fantastic episode; 8.7 would also be on my list of great ones) it is unsurpassed, and I finally got that feeling again in the very last episode, 10.6, where we see exactly the frighteningly murky depths of Harry Pearce’s character and the precise dimensions of his personal weakness revealed in every last excruciating detail. As the various twists of the deception he’s fallen prey to emerge, in his every reaction, we see a man who is, as Ilya Gavrik charges facetiously in the previous episode, mostly capable of love of an ideology rather than of loyalty to people. Ruth’s statement that “people like us aren’t meant to have those things” (love, marriage, family, houses, relationships) is most true of Harry, because he never had the courage to go beyond his father’s saying. Ruth says, “we’re made of secrets,” and this is why Harry has to return to the Grid, which he (IMO unsurprisingly) does at the end of the series, because has nothing else. Nothing but an idée fixe and the secrets he’s amassed to guard it. When Ruth dies, the final hope for his humanity (in the sense of its capacity to grasp the individual) dies, too, and nothing is left but spying. You also feel, here, the truth of John Bateman’s words to him in his final moments (paraphrasing) about how Harry won’t be changed by any of it — he’ll just tell self-pitying stories about it later over alcohol.
• Though the way the final scene is filmed it almost seemed to me that his return is supposed to make us feel better about the fate of the nation. We’re in good hands with Harry. Not. If I have one big structural critique of Spooks as a piece of art, it’s that it all too often made the philosophical issues it explored questions of personal moral philosophy; it never questioned that the fates of these huge entities (and the lives of the people who live in them) were in the hands of such ridiculously venial individuals. That Spooks never saw, or said, that international politics is fatally flawed precisely by the fact that we let it be run by people with such terrible personalities and questionable moralities, people whom we wouldn’t have as friends or allow into our homes, was one of its most disappointing features for me as a viewer. The whisky drinking is the big symbol of this — we are supposed to pity Harry because he needs the satisfaction of a bottle in his office to get through the day, as opposed to asking ourselves, why does anyone have a job where he needs a bottle in his office?
• Then again, it’s “only” entertainment.

~ by Servetus on June 25, 2012.