Lucas North, teenagers, and Richard Armitage’s performance of anger fatigue — Destination Spooks 9.1

[Note to self: I wanted to get back to Richard Armitage’s roles, acting, and emotions. The only way to start is to start. Put one finger on the keyboard after another.]

My original review of Spooks 9.1 was published here on the night of the premiere, but in rereading what was obviously a cursory attempt in comparison to the analyses I was writing later, I see there’s plenty of room for more comment on my part. What a relief. I was proposing a question about Armitage’s performance of emotionality in relationship to character arc back then, so this might fit into filling that bill. Can’t believe that was broadcast two-and-a-half years ago already — makes me feel very old.

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Sophia Myles as Beth Bailey, Richard Armitage as Lucas North, and Max Brown as Dimitri Levendis in a promotional still for series 9 of Spooks.

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I. Preface: Baseline for Lucas’ commitment to his job

[Left: Lucas North (Richard Armitage) protests his exclusion from the Grid to Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) in Spooks 7.2. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

One of the fundamental aspects of the Lucas North character was his absolute commitment to his work, a feature that made him, like Mr. Thornton, automatically resonate with me. Even after eight years in a Russian prison, the first thing Lucas wants to do upon returning is get back to it. He does it at a level of fatigue that makes it look wearily joyless, but he still can’t leave it alone. In Spooks 7.2, Lucas tells Harry that if he can’t rejoin Section D, he won’t be home — “only back in England.” Like Mr. Thornton, without his work, on some level Lucas lacks an identity — an appropriate status for a spy, whose job it is to be other people in order to extract information for exploitative advantage or the protection of the (often thankless or unaware) nation.

I can’t resist pointing out — lacking identity without work is also a suggestive status for an actor to embrace. When does a practical career choice turn into a de facto state of mind? Four major roles in a row — Mr. Thornton, Guy of Gisborne, Lucas North, John Porter — who incorporate different ways of overidentification with their work? To some extent, as Max Weber would have realized, this is the modern condition, so it’s not surprising that our dramas are preoccupied with it. But role choices like this made Richard Armitage a match made me for in heaven as a mirror of self. And they cause me to wonder if there wasn’t something else at work in the fact of Armitage’s constant engagements from 2006 to 2012 besides not wanting to turn down work.

[Right: Richard Armitage in the main publicity head shot of Lucas North for series 9, which made him look the most cruel he ever had. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

But back to the argument. Lucas, like his comrades in spying, like all the spooks who’d been incinerated, blown up, shot, garrotted, died as human shields, or otherwise fantastically offed before him, something Armitage noted repeatedly that he relished about the series, over-identifies with the tasks he accomplishes on behalf of an always very vaguely articulated notion of protecting the public weal and the general public. Commitment to this task is not unlike Weber’s iron cage, and so in so many ways, as alyssabethancourt wrote, “[Lucas] himself is the prison from which he cannot escape” (something else he shares with Thornton). And if Lucas can’t escape it, he can’t live in it, either. Spooks 9 thus tells us, among many other stories, the tale of the increasing untenability of work as ultima ratio via the erosion of Lucas’ capacity to keep on being Lucas. This decline is not only a passive tragedy — it’s something that Lucas does to himself in line with his need to control situations for his own benefit. Demonstrating this facet of the character is one great strength and convincing moment of alyssabethancourt’s analysis — her awareness, rare among commentators on this series in the Armitage fandom, which has toward defensiveness in its discussion of series 9, that Lucas also acts consistently in his own self-interest. One of the closing scenes of Spooks 9.1 sets up the problem alyssabethancourt outlines — and the demise of Lucas North as hero — quite effectively: how Lucas resolves his relationships with some of the most vulnerable people affected by his mission to protect his country — teenagers.

II. Spooks 7.6 and Lucas North’s grief

[Left: Lucas North (Richard Armitage) and Dean Mitchell (Jacob Anderson) start their recon of the breaker’s yard playing spies, before the bad guys get there, in Spooks 7.6. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

It was quite noticeable as an element of Spooks series plotting that Lucas North was senior case officer for problems involving troublesome kids. This story line emerged in Spooks 7.6, and recurred in 8.7, only to be given an abrupt — and telling — denouement in 9.1. In 7.6 (incidentally, one of my favorite episodes) Lucas dealt with Dean, the young man who happened upon a stolen hi-tech weapon and had to be convinced to sell it, to hide, to help find the additional information that would allow his mother to come out of hiding — and was killed, nonetheless, after he refused to get on the train for Spain with the dispatch Ros and Lucas insisted on. The rhetorical pitch of Lucas’ loyalties is low in this episode, perhaps because while Dean’s a bit of a hood, the teen’s also fallen upon this situation accidentally.

Even so, the end of the episode is clearly a failure of calculation for both Lucas and Ros, who can’t get Dean and his mum away fast enough to protect him from the revenge of Michael Sands. As a response to Dean’s death, Lucas’ sense of first shock and then failure is evident on his face.

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) witnesses the execution of Dean Mitchell in Spooks 7.6. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Because of the weight that he’s lost in prison, Lucas’ face for most of series 7 always looked a little peaked (even if he was gaining weight toward the end of the series as Armitage added weight and muscle in preparation for the constant video-game fight scenes of series 3 of Robin Hood, which he filmed immediately afterwards). This mood of physiognomy always added to the childlike mood of the series 7 character, who sported a bit with his spy activities in 7.3 and 7.4, and who frequently seemed to be grieving openly for the past, as Lucas’ scenes with his ex-wife, Elizaveta Starkova, underlined. Because of the occasionally almost naive cast of certain of his facial features in this series, Lucas’ grief took on a tinge of something that’s hard to describe.

A few moments later, Lucas North’s grief as he sees that Dean’s dead, in Spooks 7.6. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

It’s the look a child has on his when he drops a dish and it shatters on the floor (and contains seeds of the expression of displeasure we will see again in Lucas / John Bateman’s encounters with Vaughn on the Thames Embankment in series 9). I’m not sure what adjective to assign to that — and I’m not ready to assign a moral status to it, because as his behavior in all of series 7 reveals shows, Lucas is first and foremost a spook and only second a hero — except to note that Lucas’ grief in response to Dean’s execution is vivid and never shielded from view. However he feels about this failure specifically, we can see here that Lucas knows he has failed and that it is causing him difficulties.

III. Spooks 8.7 and Lucas North’s resignation

[Right: Ashok (Ashley Kumar) reacts negatively to Lucas North’s (Richard Armitage) insistence that he infiltrate the cell, in Spooks 8.7. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

Spooks always made it difficult to assess time elapsed between episodes, but the series implied that at the opening of its eighth season, Lucas was fully re-integrated into his job — having had the major success of being first to realize that Connie was the mole in 7.7, and then playing an important role in rescuing Harry from his kidnappers in 8.1. He had regained enough control of his career to co-instigate a manipulative love affair with Sarah Caulfield when it suited him, even if troubling memories and people from his past (Oleg Darshavin) continued to plague him. His actions throughout 8.4 showed that he viewed himself as once again an independent operator. If Spooks 7 was about Lucas regaining his sea legs, then Spooks 8 showed Lucas as a fully functioning spy, making him into a competent fellow player under Ros’ supervision as chief of Section D. Richard Armitage’s claims in publicity interviews preceding series 9 that Harry and Ros had never trusted Lucas after his return notwithstanding, they certainly gave him important responsibilities and entrusted him with their lives. And in Spooks 8.7, another favorite episode of mine, they put the entire responsibility for running a vital asset in his hands.

[Left: Lucas North (Richard Armitage) talks Ashok (Ashley Kumar) into cooperation in Spooks 8.7. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

Again, it’s a teenager, Ashok Veerkal, a Muslim youth with a Hindu surname whose sporting activities have catapulted him in a cell of would-be terrorists. Having reported the disturbing conversations like a good citizen, Ashok now finds himself pushed to take on all the responsibilities of the professional spook — wearing a wire, conducting potentially entrapping conversations, and acting at Lucas’ behest to cause the death of another youth in the group in order to save himself. A tall order for a grown-up spook, let alone for a teenager who’s tried to absent himself from Lucas’ grip at least once and been threatened with his parents’ harassment. Ashok obtains the necessary information for Lucas — but a series of snafus in the process let Lucas lose track of Ashok. In one of the most harrowing scenes of series 7-9, Lucas enters a school on his own, against Harry’s orders, to take down all the “terrorists” and save Ashok, ostensibly because he promised Ashok he would.

This part of 8.7 will get its own motion and gestural analysis one day, as Armitage imbues several moments of it with a transfixingly beautiful dancer’s grace. For the purposes of this post, however, I’m once again interested in the expression on Lucas’ face once the action is completed. How does he process what’s just happened, once all the remaining teenagers have been pushed to the side, the female hostages have been freed (especially the white pregnant English woman Muslim — talk about a freighted victim), Ashok’s been dislocated from Harish Dhillon’s grip, and Dhillon’s been separated from the lighter he was planning to use to burn himself up.

As crime-scene cleanup proceeds, Lucas approaches Ashok to thank him, starting from apparent confidence that Ashok will share his own perception that they’ve just done something valuable and that his thanks will be accepted in the spirit it’s given. We’re all Englishmen and heroes here.

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) starts to thank Ashok Veerkal in Spooks 8.7. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

But Ashok, perhaps not having bought into all of Lucas’ assumptions (or at least not having been asked whether he would), is more skeptical, and we can see that very slight smile of reassurance erode as Ashok responds negatively to the thanks.

As Ashok tells Lucas that he and Dhillon are the same, Lucas is at first the neutral observer:

The same, subsequent frame. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Then quite a bit hurt:

The same, later frame. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Moving, upon Ashok’s charge that he’s a liar, into one of Armitage’s decisive gestural moves for both Lucas — the restrained eye blink that signals an acknowledgement of inner annihilation …

The same, still later frame. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

And finally, into a sort of accepting hurt that will open up toward a silent, introspective bitterness.

The same, final frame. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

If in series 7, Lucas responds to the failure of his plans with shock and grief, the end of his contact with one of society’s most vulnerable and least responsible, in series 8 he’s moved to pushing a teenager to participate in plans following his own (vaguely articulated) principles, and then doesn’t even get the reward of sharing his feelings about the success of their impromptu operation afterwards.

Ashok pushes Lucas away, resentfully, dramatically. Lucas, once again having saved England, has no choice but to take it. He closes his face and the scene ends.

IV. Spooks 9.1. and Lucas North’s exhaustion

[Right: Lucas North (Richard Armitage) on the Grid just before the operation against “Talwar,” in Spooks 9.1. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

If we’re looking for a visible character arc for Lucas North (soon to be John Bateman) that follows the lines of Armitage’s developing portrayal of emotionality in the role, the “teenager” matter is a good one, because it’s brought to an abrupt end in 9.1, when an operation involving the seizure of (Somali?) hijackers lets Section D discover an operation to destroy the Houses of Parliament with a submersible bomb channeled by remote up the Thames estuary. Investigations reveal that the Thames barrier system is down, at the behest of a hacker known only as “Talwar.” In the climactic scene of the episode, Lucas and his soon-to-be colleague Beth Bailey (Sophia Miles) break into a house to learn that Talwar is: a teenage girl.

This is the scene I’m thinking of — mostly in its entirety, with some cuts of dialogue between Harry and Ruth (who’s trying to convince Harry not to resign from MI-5, as he has done at an earlier point in the episode).

By the beginning of series 9, Richard Armitage had compressed Lucas’ emotions down to a very limited gestural and expressional repertoire. To some extent, one suspects, this happened under pressure from having filmed Strike Back 1.1-6 in the preceding months and finishing it only shortly before. In especially the physical sense, the effect of having played Porter on Armitage’s power and physical confidence was easily apparent in some of Armitage’s performances of Lucas. But in comparison to the wounded Lucas of series 7 and the potentially recovering but still scarred and often (in alyssabethancourt’s terms) angry because so often betrayed and outmaneuvered Lucas of series 8, the Lucas North who comes out to board the ship to begin the operation is mean, scabbed over, and bitter. Even his concern for the prostitute who turns out to be an independent agent — Beth — is expressed with a brutality and lack of subtlety that would have been entirely foreign to Lucas in series 7. This is a Lucas North who has seen it all and hopes for nothing more, even as he continues to spout the rhetoric of protecting his country as a contrast to his scorn for Beth when he abandons her to make her own way back to London.

So in series 9 Armitage supplies us with a harder Lucas than before, and we can adduce both practical / logistical and script narrative reasons to explain that turn. But I think this is quite a remarkable performance in terms of exactly how Armitage chooses to play out the changes in Lucas, who, at the end of the episode, will be revealed by Vaughn as “John.” Because his hardness is not always harder, louder, more violent, more frightening. It’s often less of all of those things.

It starts with more of them, though, as the scene opens with Lucas’ entry into the house of “Talwar.” Here he’s a decisively more physical Lucas than he has been in previous seasons.

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) enters the house of “Talwar,” behind Beth, in Spooks 9.1. My cap.

He’s also decisively louder — as if he can frighten the terrorist into submission. But the house isn’t quite what he expects, I can’t help but think — a pleasant suburban dwelling with a homey kitchen. But this is a Lucas who takes no prisoners, who plays his advantage as violently as possible, for effect. Lucas screams at a level that I remember surprised me a little at the time.

“Are you Talwar?” Lucas North (Richard Armitage) screams. “Who is Talwar?” in Spooks 9.1. My cap.

But the yelling doesn’t provide the necessary results, and Beth moves the investigation upstairs, where we learn that “Talwar” is the daughter of the family as we watch her douse herself in some flammable substance. As Lucas peruses the computer screen, he’s not yelling yet, but he’s got his cruelest possible voice and expressions on.

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) orders “Talwar” to get the system back on line in Spooks 9.1. My cap.

Something fascinating here is what we see Armitage not doing. I capped my way through this scene, and normally in the time that we see Armitage’s face here (from the girl’s perspective; against the computer) we’d see four or five microexpressions. Guy of Gisborne certainly would have managed many fleeting shades of emotion, as would series 7 or 8 Lucas. I was able to manually extract (without slowing playback at all) six caps in this scene. But in all those caps, there are only two expressions. Armitage has simply made Lucas’ face a great deal harder by obliterating or flattening his typical microexpressions and thus turning the character into someone a great deal more monolithic.

We can question how we like that as a strategy. I personally love the microexpressions and they are part of what moves to keep watching Armitage again and again. But in a way, it’s like he’s figured out something here — because by slowing down the performance of his emotions, he manages to make them seem both more incisive and penetrating — and also more …

exhausted.

In his dealings with the girl in this case, there’s a quick escalation in the next minutes of the scene.

“Do it!” Lucas North (Richard Armitage) yells — and gets his nose into it, in Spooks 9.1. My cap.

But as he listens to Tariq explaining to him what will happen if the barrier system doesn’t go back up, he’s pulled back into rationality, and his decision to pull out his sidearm and threaten the girl with appears motivated by calculation rather than adrenaline or emotion.

Lucas (Richard Armitage) listens to Tariq …

… and then pulls out his weapon, in Spooks 9.1. My caps.

And then — he backs off again. His voice is quiet. He tells the girl to restore the system.

Boom.

expression 1 — force with regret?

expression 2 — psyching himself up?

expression 3 — nervous but quiet command?

And utters one of the most interesting lines ever: “Don’t think I won’t kill you,” pause, “because you’re a teenage girl.”

expression 4 — calm collection behind his threat, and then —

Old Style Lucas, Old Style Armitage? A quick flash of regret.

But it’s gone again just as quickly, because Lucas is asking for advice, and now his main expressions are hard, as he decides to have the parents brought upstairs:

And his microexpressions move toward frustration and exasperation, in line with his next escalation of the scene, which is to threaten the girl’s mother, even as he says, “Please don’t make me do this.”

This is not the Lucas we knew, know, despite the hardness we’re seeing. It’s almost as if the way Armitage’s microexpressions disappear (are edited down?) are a secret signal to us that we shouldn’t believe either him or what he’s doing.

And he gets in one micro-snarl, almost as if he’s trying to talk himself into it, even as she won’t comply, and he acknowledges that she’s won their standoff.

He escalates again: “Don’t make me do this!”

… with the classic Armitage articulation of “Don’t” as distinct from the rest of the sentence (we see that from both Guy of Gisborne and Thorin Oakenshield, at least, perhaps from others as well).

And Lucas realizes it’s over — for him, anyway.

As the scene ends, the electromagnetic advice gets the bombs, and England is saved, Lucas informs her that she’s failed — but in exhaustion, as if he has nothing left anymore.

Interestingly, in display his exhaustion, Lucas’ microexpressions become more voluble again — as if he’s telling us, here I am again, the real Lucas North, the one who’d never threaten a teenager.

And the scene ends with Lucas’ head down, and Armitage’s voice as quiet as it’s been in the entire episode.

The line is uttered really quietly, even for Armitage — and of course, as we know by the end of the scene, he won’t — or can’t — make himself do it. Again, above, we’re seeing a more edited version of Lucas’ facial expressions repertoire than we’ve ever seen — but it works to make Lucas seem a great deal more tired than he has ever seemed in a stress situation before.

V. Conclusion

Because at key moments, Armitage’s performance of Lucas in 9.1 is less of all the things we expect, it gives us an important prerequisite to accepting the plausibility of the John Bateman storyline. If we’re to believe that plot strand, not only must we accept that the man we know as Lucas North really was someone else a long time ago — but also that regaining that other identity could be an attractive possibility. The second, I would argue, is harder. Lucas is a hero; he’s a professional; one assumes he’s well remunerated and has the respect of his peers. (He lacks love, and so we’re fed the somewhat implausible and undeveloped Maya as bait.) But I would argue that, given Lucas’ general focus on his work as constitutive of his identity, something decisive has to happen to make him weary of the work, and thus of his identity — and so willing to abandon the Lucas North identity to become John Bateman again. The decisive difference here is that toward the end of Spooks 9.1, Lucas becomes someone who no longer enjoys his work — and that’s the theme signaled by the way the teenager plots end here.

If we compare the climactic scene in Spooks 8.7 with this scene in Spooks 9.1 in particular, we can see that Lucas’ willingness to identify with the least of these in 7.6, his sustained intensity, the mood that brings him through all the changes of power in 8.7, are all simply missing here. 9.1 gives us a herky-jerky Lucas who escalates and then backs off, and who, in the end, perhaps earns our love by not being able to kill the girl or her mother, but indicates through this failure that he no longer has the necessary sustained power to get himself through this kind of standoff. Armitage signals this problem — this sudden deficiency — by making Lucas harder and by making him “less” microexpressive and thus less apparently energetic.

Alyssabethancourt writes of Lucas, “At Lucas’s core is the knowledge that he’s not one of the innocent.  That it is no one’s job to protect him, that he has no right to even ask for help.  That he’s all alone and he deserves whatever he gets.” I would add to that: At Lucas’ core is a growing weariness with this solitude and lack of support. An inability to continue.

In consequence of Armitage’s performance, 9.1 Lucas, it appears, is tired — hard and tired. Tired of dealing with the unpredictable among the most vulnerable whom he’s pledge to protect, aware that all the principles have been turned on their backs and in his face, tired of being a spook, tired of screaming — tired of being Lucas North. When Vaughn comes on at the end, to ask him, “How was it? Being Lucas North?” Lucas is only too ready to rethink that question, and become John.

~ by Servetus on June 7, 2013.